A Cognitive Study Of Phonosemantics

Phonosemantics intends to study the relationship between sound and meaning.As a new subject, it has a short history, but the debate between sound and meaningcan date back to Plato times, which has lasted thousands of years. Generally speaking,there are two different opinions about the debate, they are arbitrariness andnon-arbitrariness. The father of modern linguistic, Ferdinand de Saussure, supportsthe idea of arbitrariness, he believes that there is no correlation between sound andmeaning, which means they are arbitrary. Different from traditional linguistics,phonosemantics believes that there is relationship between sound and meaning, theyare not arbitrary. However, the emerging of cognitive linguistics in the late1980sreinforced the view of phonosemantics. Cognitive linguists think language has deepcongruent relationship with the objective world. Though the view of phonosemanticsis contrary to the view of arbitrariness of mainstream linguistics, more and morelinguists are paying attention to it.The research of phonosemantics shows that to some extent sound does carrymeaning, for example:/i/carries the meaning of small;/fl/carries the meaning offlying or flowing movement. Then what about the phoneme/r/? If it also carries somemeanings, what meanings it has and what is the relationship between these meanings?With these questions, the thesis intends to research the meanings of/r/and therelationships between them. At first, the author colleted all words contain the Englishletter r and looked up the meaning of these words using Oxford Advanced Learner’sEnglish-Chinese Dictionary. At last, the author colleted299words in total andclassified these words into six categories according to their meaning. And the sixcategories are:1) words related to “roll”;2) words related to “revolve”;3) wordsrelated to “curl”;4) words related to “sound”;5) words related to “circle”;6) wordsrelated to “fast”. Then the author uses the theories of prototype, metaphor andmetonymy to explain the relationship of these meanings and the meaning extension ofthem. At last, the author applies the research findings to English words teaching.The author is not intended to establish a theory which runs counter to theSaussurian’s dictum, but to prove/r/does carry some meanings. The author hopes her research can offer some clue to the future research about phonosemantics and applythe findings in practice.