Khaled Oraby

The Meaning of the Phoneme /s/ in Arabic: a Phonosemantic Study in Standard Arabic Khaled Oraby

There has been a wide controversy over the relationship between sound and meaning for many years. Many linguists think that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. This study attempts to argue for the truth-value of this relationship by testing the Arabic words compiled in Al9ain dictionary that contain the phoneme /S/. Besides, a questionnaire has been conducted prompting informants with nonsense words that contain the phoneme /S/. Based on that, both existing and nonsense carriers have been classified into four major semantic domains that are assumed to be commonly signified by the words that contain the phoneme /S/: Strength, Fracture, Height, and Change. The Findings have shown up some points concerning the relationship between sounds and meanings. The most important of which has been that there is an iconic correlation between the words that contain the phoneme /S/ distributed fairly equally to the initial, medial and final positions and the four formerly mentioned semantic domains. Also, these findings point out that this correlation is inherent to the phoneme /S/ since it is iconically mirrored in the articulation.