Symmetry as Iconicity: The Lexicalizations of ‘Breasts’

A word is said to be iconic if there is a perceived similarity between its form and its meaning. Research on lexical iconicity has shown that it pervades most sections of vocabulary structure but is scarce in regards to mimicking abstract properties of referents. In this paper, we propose the abstract property of symmetry as iconic, illustrating it with the lexicalizations of the meaning ‘(woman’s) breasts’ in world languages. Statistical analysis shows that the frequency of symmetric lexemes corresponding to the symmetric notion ‘breasts’ in the world languages by far exceeds the frequency that could be expected by mere chance. We also adduce further evidence from specific languages, of phonological and semantic nature, that further supports our proposal of the existence of symmetric iconicity. In particular, some languages violate a regular sound change just in order to preserve the iconicity of the original word, others develop by analogy symmetric synonyms, and still others may falsely reanalyze a symmetric form in two identical parts just in order to reflect their perception of the meaning as symmetric. The presented arguments make a strong case for the proposed notion of symmetric iconicity.