abstractWords like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’, and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form–meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this association. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity that covary with funniness and iconicity ratings and that, we propose, serve as metacommunicative signals to draw attention to words as playful and performative. To assess the generalisability of the findings we develop a method to estimate lexical ratings from distributional semantics and apply it to a dataset 20 times the size of the original set of human ratings. The method can be used more generally to extend coverage of lexical ratings. We find that it reliably reproduces correlations between funniness and iconicity as well as cues of structural markedness, though it also amplifies biases present in the human ratings. Our study shows that the playful and the poetic are part of the very texture of the lexicon.

中文翻译：

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有趣的象似性：结构标记是滑稽性和象似性之间关系的基础

摘要像“waddle”、“flop”和“zigzag”这样的词结合了有趣的内涵和标志性的形式——意思是相似的。在这里，我们提出结构标记可能是对游戏性和象似性感知的一个共同因素。使用收集和估计的词汇评级，涵盖总计超过 70,000 个英语单词，我们评估了这种关联的稳健性。我们确定语音复杂性的线索，这些线索与有趣性和象似性评级共同变化，我们建议，这些线索可以作为元交际信号，以吸引人们注意单词的趣味性和表演性。为了评估研究结果的普遍性，我们开发了一种从分布语义估计词汇评级的方法，并将其应用于原始人类评级集大小的 20 倍的数据集。该方法可以更普遍地用于扩展词汇评级的覆盖范围。我们发现它可靠地再现了有趣性和象似性之间的相关性以及结构标记的线索，尽管它也放大了人类评分中存在的偏见。我们的研究表明，俏皮和诗意是词汇结构的一部分。