Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Quechua Texts Of Perception, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Recent work by anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians has made significant strides in our understanding of the dynamics and poetics of spoken utterances. Such work has been motivated, generally, by the goal of understanding verbal expression in terms of its own unique structures and expressive modalities. The following paper will contribute to this line of inquiry. It offers an analysis of a form of expression, sound symbolism, that is widely used by people whose languages have not been written down. The main advantage of this analysis is that it rescues sound symbolism from the irrational abyss into which it has often …