Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

16.3 The significance of sound patterns
Unit 16 Rhyme and sound patterning
Section 4 Poetic form

So far, we have simply identified possible patterns and presented ways of describing them. In order to investigate how such patterns work as a stylistic resource, we need now to consider what kind of significance or function they might have. Five alternative possibilities are presented below. Each possibility should be considered for each case of sound patterning identified in a text:

(1) Patterning may serve no particular function, and be simply the accidental result of a random distribution of the small number of distinct sounds that make up the language. This is especially likely in spontaneous conversation. It is also likely where there is some closeness in the text between instances of the sound taken to create the effect: functional sound patterning depends on proximity between the words involved, since readers (or listeners) are unlikely to recognize sounds repeated far apart. Moving to a more formal type of description (see Fabb, 1997), we can express this another way by saying that a closeness constraint seems to operate on some or all kinds of sound patterning, and that this closeness constraint seems required in order to ensure that such patterning is noticeable or perceptually ’salient’.

(2) Patterning may serve a ’cohesive’ function, bonding words together as formulaic, fixed phrases or units. This extra bonding at the level of sound can enhance the memorability of an utterance, as in riddles, catch phrases and proverbs (’action-packed’; ’a stitch in time saves nine’; ’be Indian, buy Indian’, etc.).

(3) Patterning may have the effect of emphasizing or ’foregrounding’ some aspect of the text. Sometimes patterning that involves repetition serves to make a passage seem as though it expresses great feeling, as is often the case in political rhetoric. Sometimes the physical existence of the utterance as a linguistic construct is emphasized, as in the case of tongue twisters such as the alliterative ’Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppercorns’. Notice incidentally that the alliteration here is set against a kind of counter-alliteration (the [p] sound and the [k] sound are made at opposite ends of the mouth), which is what creates the tongue twister.

(4) Patterning may have the effect of creating or reinforcing a parallelism. In this case, words that are linked together on the basis of shared sounds will also be linked in terms of their meanings (they typically have similar or opposite meanings). This technique is common in jokes, advertising and some types of poetry (e.g. Augustan verse). Consider, from this point of view, such phrases as ’chalk and cheese’ and ’cash and carry’; or recall Blake’s ’marks of weakness, marks of woe’, for an example of this effect in Romantic poetry (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure).

(5) Patterning may contribute sound symbolism. Such effects are based on a belief that the sounds that make up words are not arbitrarily related to their meaning, as most linguists think, but are motivated in some way by being loaded with resonance or connotational value.

A number of points are worth noting about the notion of sound symbolism:

(a) The linguistic view that the sounds of language are arbitrary is supported by evidence such as the fact that the same meaning is expressed in different languages by words with very different sounds (’tree’, ’arbre’, ’Baum’, etc.), and that the sounds of words change over time. Such evidence suggests that sounds are merely conventional aspects of the formal system of a language.

(b) The view that sounds in language may have symbolic meanings or expressive effects, on the other hand, is based on a musical belief that sound itself carries meaning, as well as on the idea that individual sounds are felt differently because the way we make them with the voice differs for each sound. Consider three types of much-discussed evidence for this:

(i) Here are three imaginary but possible ’words’: ’la’, ’li’ and ’lor’. If you had three tables of different sizes to label with these words, which would you call which? Research has shown that most people - across a wide range of different cultures - label the small table ’li’, the middle-sized one ’la’ and the largest ’lor’. This tendency probably reflects the fact that sounds are made differently in the mouth: ’lor’ is a ’big’ sound (mouth open, tongue back, large mouth cavity); ’li’, by contrast, is a ’small’ sound (mouth relatively closed, tongue up and forward, etc.).

(ii) Some groups of words have both their sound and their general area of meaning in common (this effect is traditionally called ’onomatopoeia’): ’clatter’, ’clang’ and ’clash’ all suggest one thing striking against another; ’sneeze’, ’snore’, ’snooze’ and ’sniffle’ are all to do with breathing through the nose and might be considered to sound like the actions they refer to (though consider ’snow’ and ’snap’ as counter-examples).

(iii) Consider the hypothesis of a gradience of linguistic sounds, from ’hard’ through to ’soft’. The so-called hardest sounds include [p], [b], [t], [d], [k] and [g] (these are technically called stops or plosives and all involve completely stopping breath coming out of the mouth, then releasing it suddenly). The so-called softest sounds are the vowels (which do not impede the air-flow out of the mouth at all, but simply reshape it), plus sounds like those commonly produced from the letters ’w’ and ’l’. The idea that words contain hard and soft sounds is sometimes then used as the basis for making an equation between sound and meaning.

(c) Sound symbolism involves attributing conventional meanings or resonances to sound patterns. In Keats’s famous line in ’To Autumn’ (1820), ’Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours’, the repeated ’s’ and ’z’ sounds are often taken to represent the oozing of cider in the press. In an equally well-known line from Tennyson, ’The murmuring of innumerable bees’ (’The Princess’ [1853]), the repeated ’m’ sounds are taken to represent the sound of bees. These associations of sound and meaning are not fixed, however: the sounds ’s’ and ’z’ could equally be taken to stand for the buzzing of bees if they were in a poem about bees. Meaning thus contributes significantly to the apparent effect of sound symbolism in a poem.