The non-arbitrariness of some conative calls used to chase animals

Abstract

The present article demonstrates that languages tend to contain dispersals – a subtype of conative calls used to chase animals – that are built around voiceless sibilants. This tendency is both quantitative (i.e., voiceless-sibilant dispersals are common across languages and in a single language) and qualitative (i.e., sibilants contribute very significantly to the phonetic substance of such dispersals). This fact, together with a range of formal similarities exhibited by voiceless-sibilant dispersals encapsulated by the pattern [kI/Uʃ] suggests that the presence of voiceless sibilants in dispersals is not arbitrary. Overall, voiceless-sibilant dispersals tend to comply with the general phonetic profile associated with the prototype of CACs and dispersals, postulated recently in scholarship, thus corroborating the validity of this prototype.