Formalizing Form–Meaning Decoupling as a Cross-Linguistic Resource for Style, Metaphor and "Linguistic Atmosphere"

This paper develops a theoretical and partially formalized account of a cross-linguistic phenomenon: in some languages (notably English) orthographic/phonological similarity between words often does not strictly imply semantic similarity, whereas in others (notably Chinese) form and meaning are tightly coupled. I present a general framework that (1) explicates the relevant spaces (form space and semantic space), (2) defines measurable parameters that characterize the degree of coupling between form and meaning, (3) relates low coupling to increased latent potential for certain kinds of metaphor, associative style, and what speakers describe as “linguistic temperament” or “language sense/feel”, and (4) situates languages on a continuous spectrum. The framework is intentionally agnostic about particular datasets and instead gives operational definitions and concrete metrics (graph and distributional measures) that allow empirical testing. I discuss cross-linguistic predictions, implications for literary style and creativity, and applications to computational models (embeddings, generation). I close with concrete empirical protocols and an agenda for turning the theory into testable claims.