Sound Symbolism Continuum in Hafiz “Based on Hinton’s Framework”

Sound symbolism and iconicity which refers to a motivated relation between the signifier and the signified of a sign, is a literary and aesthetic feature whose usage in Hafiz’s poems have caught the attention of many linguists. In the line of this fact, the purpose of this study was to consider different types of motivation in the Hafiz’s Ghazals within Hinton et al.’s (1994) sound symbolism continuum. In so doing, all the lines and hemistiches consisting at least one type of sound symbolism – corporeal, imitative, synesthetic, and conventional –were collected to be studied in terms of their types and frequencies. The result of the study showed all types of sound symbolism from the most to the least transparency. It explains how important is this relation in poetry as well as its role in poem’s attractiveness and permanency. The quantitative analysis of the signs also revealed that there was a direct relation between the degree of motivation and their frequencies, that is, the more the signs were transparent the more their frequencies were. Therefore, the corporeal signs were of the highest frequency and the conventional signs were of the lowest frequency.