Linguistic and Symbolic Properties of Sound Emission Verbs : A Case Study of Birds and its Theoretical Implications

This study aims to explicate some linguistic and sound-symbolic properties of English verbs that serve to describe the sounds made by birds.These verbs are analyzed in terms of their syllable structures, phonemic characteristics, etymology, and morphology, to explicate the degrees of sound-symbolic and conventional patterns within sound emission verbs in English.The structure of the article is as follows.In section 2, some crucial concepts and consequences of the studies of Kumagai ( 2015) and (2017) are briefly described.Some formal and etymological properties of the verbs of sounds made by birds are analyzed and summarized in section 3; then, the relevance of the acoustic and perceptual properties of nuclear vowels to the sound emitters' size and other physical characteristics will be explored and discussed.Finally, we will discuss the internal structure of the syllable and propose that the nuclear vo wel, which reflects the sound-symbolic property of the emitter, may also motivate the choice of consonantal segments inside the syllable. Previous Studies: Verbs of Laughing and Crying Kumagai (2015) on the Verbs of Laughing by HumansAlthough verbs of laughing and crying follow the conventional codifying patterns of English, as exemplified below, the purpose of this study is, nevertheless, to detect the degree of symbolic characteristics inside the 50 50 ()