What is it about?
Argues that vocalic sound symbolism, whereby high second formant (F2) correlates with perception of small size (as in diminutives in many languages), is a significant contributing factor to the vowel rotations that have affected spoken English from the early modern period to today. Shows that speaker sex, as a proxy for a more abstract hypocoristic quality, correlates with presence/absence of sharp shifts in the direction of high F2. Adduces comparative data from Arabic.
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Why is it important?
Brings out the bridge between the so-called "internal" and "external" factors in sociophonetics.
Perspectives
Got a frosty reception from sociolinguists at the time. Now, however, sociolinguists like P. Eckert have begun talking in similar ways.
Jeffrey Heath
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This page is a summary of: Sex, Sound Symbolism, and Sociolinguistics, Current Anthropology, August 1998, University of Chicago Press,
DOI: 10.1086/204758.
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