... the word to be arbitrary it can only hold meaning in relation to other words. These ideas are the basis on which much of the current literary thought stems from. Phonesthesia is a linguistic term relating to the idea that phonesthemes can contain inherent meaning. It is a branch of linguistics that stems from Sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between of an utterance and its meaning and consists mainly of three types of sound meaning which were originally formed by Von Humboldt in the 18th Century; these are onomatopoeia, clustering and iconism. Onomatopoeia refers to the use of the letters of the alphabet to imitate a sound in the real world. It can therefore only apply to sounds or to words which denote sound. Clustering is concerned with words which share sounds that have meaning at vowel and consonant level; Magnus (1997) refers to this ...

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