FROM NATURAL ACOUSTIC REFLEX TO DISTRIBUTIONAL PROOF: EMPIRICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PHONOSEMANTIC MOTIVATION IN THE ODAM TILI FRAMEWORK

Аннотация

The Saussurean axiom of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign has survived for over a century largely due to the absence of scalable methods to test its opposite. This paper presents a unified empirical argument against pure arbitrariness by integrating three independent lines of evidence under the Odam Tili framework developed by Mahmudjon Kuchkarov. First, a controlled behavioral experiment conducted in 2017 at Esta Florida Tennis Academy, USA, with 26 naive volunteers using the S-ilon methodology, which showed systematic above chance mapping between phonetic features and shape, size, and affective meaning. Second, a series of naturalistic field experiments conducted between 2017 and 2019, including acoustic analysis of breaking branches of T and Ch trees with varying diameters, long distance shouting competitions, and heavy versus light load lifting competitions where the H sound emerges as an involuntary physiological reflex. Results of these experiments were presented and published in 2020 at the First International Conference on Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching at Fergana State University, Uzbekistan. Third, the recent large scale distributional study by Flint and Kislay 2025, titled Quantifying Phonosemantic Iconicity Distributionally in 6 Languages, which analyzed English, Spanish, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, and Tamil using top 5000 lemmas, GPT-4 based morphological segmentation, PanPhon articulatory vectors, and FastText semantic embeddings with RSA, Mutual Information, and Canonical Correlation Analysis. Full text available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14040v1 and summary at https://chatpaper.com/chatpaper/paper/200550. We argue that these three strands converge on a single conclusion and provide a SCOPUS level foundation for Odam Tili. This argument is timely for the upcoming Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language HISPhonCog 2026, which explicitly calls for new empirical experimental evidence on the cognitive functions of fine phonetic detail https://linguistlist.org/issues/36/3413/.