Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. By Janis B. Nuckolls (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics. ) New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. iv, 297. 65. 00.

Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words - words that bear resemblance to phenomena they attempt to describe - in an Ecuadorian dialect of Quechua, a major South American language. She explores how the speakers describe everyday experience and how sound-symbolism is integral to their way of thinking and speaking.