Iconic-systematicity in Guangzhou Cantonese Reduplicative Ideophones

Abstract

This study investigates whether Guangzhou Cantonese ABB ideophones exhibit iconic-systematicity, the statistical association between speech sounds and sensory meanings that is grounded in perceived resemblance. While such systematic sound-meaning correspondences have been widely documented in Indo-European languages, it remains unknown whether they exist in tonal languages with rich reduplicative morphology. To address this gap, a corpus of 181 Guangzhou Cantonese ABB ideophones was compiled. Phonological features were coded as 82 binary variables, and semantic embeddings were derived from dictionary definitions and example sentences. Global prediction models (Partial Least Squares and Random Forest) did not reliably predict the continuous semantic space, suggesting that phonological features do not reliably predict the overall semantic space. However, theory-driven univariate tests revealed two significant associations after false discovery rate correction. The high front vowel /i/ was strongly linked to physical smallness, replicating a cross-linguistic pattern. The voiceless alveolar stop /t/ showed a position-sensitive effect: only coda /t/ was associated with smallness, while onset /t/ was not. No evidence was found for an /a/-largeness link. These findings provide evidence for iconic-systematicity in Guangzhou Cantonese ideophones, but suggest that it is restricted to specific phonemes and sensitive to syllabic position, highlighting a language-specific constraint on sound-symbolic patterning.