PHONAESTHETIC

FALLACY
 If someone asked you to say
the most beautiful word or
phrase in English, what would
you choose? Would it be based
on the meaning of the word?
How it sounds? How it is
spelled?
What is PHONAESTHETIC ?
Phonaesthetics is the study of
the euphony and cacophony of
words without regard for
semantics. Phonaesthetics
derives from two Greek word
parts that mean voice-sound
and aesthetics.
 Euphony is used most
commonly to describe
the pleasing, agreeable
sound effect of poetry.
In general, vowel sounds
are more euphonious.
 Cacophony, meaning
harsh and discordant, is
the opposite of euphony.
Cacophony comes from
the Greek word parts
meaning bad, evil, and
voice.
Did you nd my interpretation of
sound symbolism in (1) and (2)
convincing? Can phonetic detail be
matched up with a text in such a
way? Or perhaps the
interpretation reads too much into
a few simple vowels and
consonants? So were my views
mere hunch?
 The simple truth of the matter is that in
phonetics there is simply no such thing as a
dry consonant or a ying vowel, and such
impressionistic labels have no place
whatsoever in the systematic study of speech
sounds.
 Stephen Spenders poem
Pylons

The valley with its gilt and evening look

And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed
of a brook.
 Gerard Manley Hopkinss
The Windhover

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air,

pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks
from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O
my chevalier!
 We need look no further than the
preceding paragraph of this sub-unit
for proof of this point. In the second
sentence, beginning Can phonetic detail
. . ., there were actually more of the
so-called dry /k/, /t/ and /t/
consonants than there were in the
Spender line.
 More tellingly, the nal
sentence of the previous
paragraph has exactly the
same progression of
vowels as the Hopkins line:

oh eh aye oo eea uh

so were my views mere hunch?

Clearly, there is a certain risk in
trying to connect up directly a
particular feature of sound in a
text with nonlinguistic
phenomena outside the text, and
the sort of interpretative
practice which does make such
direct connections might be
termed the PHONAESTHETIC
FALLACY.
The phonaesthetic
fallacy, if not
articulated in precisely
the same terminology
as here, is a serious
issue for stylistic
analysis. Nash talks of
it as something that
teachers of language
and literature have
 The fallacy lies in the assumption
that language functions
unproblematically as a direct
embodiment of the real world.
 Attridge notes as a failing in much
traditional literary criticism that it
uses aspects of sound to evoke
directly the meaning of the text: a
practice evident in common critical
comments like rhythmic enactment
or appropriate sound-
patterns(Attridge 1988: 133).
 Let me try then to set out some basic principles about the
interpretation of sound symbolism that will help avoid
the interpretive pitfall that is the phonaesthetic fallacy.

We need rst of all to make the

assumption that a particular piece of
language is intended to be performed
mimetically.
Second, we should never lose sight of
the text immediately surrounding the
particular feature of style under
consideration, the co-text in other
 There are also conventions for reading sound
imagery, such that certain types of sounds are
conventionally interpreted in certain ways.
Onomatopoeia works on the readers
familiarity with the entity described which
means that we need to know that we are
being told about, say, a dry brook or the ight
path of a falcon, before we can search out a
correspondence in sound.
Attridge adopts the useful phrase heightened
meaning to explain how onomatopoeic
conventions work (Attridge 1988: 150). Phonetic
and semantic properties interact with one
another, and in a way that mutually reinforces
and intensies both aspects of language.
 Thus, the so-calleddry consonants in
Spender are conventionally understood
as heightening the semantic quality of
aridity. This explains why a word like
waterless, which contains softer
consonants like /w/, /l/ and /s/, would not
have had the same impact even though it is
semantically compatible in the context.
 We cannot cut sound symbolism adrift from
its overall discourse context because and
this is a point that extends to all stylistic
practice the linguistic system does not
embody the real world directly. Meanings
are signalled only indirectly, so it is a guiding
principle of stylistic analysis to be cautious
about treating any aspect of language as if it
bears an inherent relationship with a given
or felt experience.