IS THAT WHICH GLITTERS IN ENGLISH ALSO GOLD IN SPANISH? Exploration of Bilingual Phonaestheme Transfer

Phonaesthemes, or interlexical repetitions of phoneme clusters sharing an element of meaning across sets of words in a language, are noteworthy form~meaning pairings indicative of compositionality within a word that are neither phones nor morphemes in the traditional sense. Despite this uncertain grammatical status, they are widely attested in myriad languages (Mompean et al, 2020). Usage-based perspectives (e.g., Bybee 2010), nevertheless, predict the emergence of phonaesthemes as automatic, natural byproducts of the cognitive organization of tokens of experience via similarity matching and categorization of statistical recurrences across words (Bergen 2004). Given how naturally phonaesthemes instantiate core usage-based tenets such as gradience, variation, and the non-modularity of grammar, the lack of empirical research into their emergence and use is noteworthy.