An Empirical Study On The Multi-semantic Pattern Of Phonaestheme

Phonaesthemes(put forward by Firth in 1930), are ‘frequently recurring sound-meaning pairings that are not contrastive morphemes’(Bergen, 2004). The example presented by Firth is ‘sl-’, which is the onset of dozens of words, such as slack, slouch, slush, sludge, slime, slosh, slash and sloppy. Firth pointed out that ‘all these words possess the pejorative meaning, though in varying degrees’ and that this pejorative meaning is expressed by the phonaestheme sl-. Many other foreign scholars(Bloomfield, 1933, 1944; Reay, 1991; Williams, 2013; et al.) also delve into the sound-meaning pairing aspect of phonaestheme, but the domestic research on this subject is scantly found. However, this dissertation is intended to broaden the scope of the phonaesthemes involved(altogether 36) and to answer the two questions: 1) what meanings does each of the 36 phonaesthemes possess? 2) how can we differentiate the meanings of the phonaesthetic words with the same onset/rime?The data of this research are categorized into two groups, the first of which come from the British National Corpus, and the second of which come from the Oxford English Dictionary stored in Powerword Ver. 2009. This paper integrates the quantitative and qualitative approaches to conduct the research. The analytical tool Word Smith 6.0 is involved to facilitate the quantitative research and the mainly adopted qualitative approach is discourse analysis.Upon the theoretical basis proposed by Saussure(1916), Bloomfield(1933), Firth(1930), et al., all the given phonaesthetic words correspondent to each of the 36 phonaesthemes are analyzed through the quantitative and qualitative approach, and the major findings show that:Firstly, except-isp and-olt, the remaining 34 phonaesthemes are finally found to be possessive of a multiple-semantic pattern that consists of varied groups of meanings(see Appendix). The two categories of meanings of ‘-asp’ are taken as the example to interpret the multiple-semantic pattern. The first category consists of CATCH, HOLD, SEIZE, GRASP and FASTEN, which are the meanings possessed by the phonaesthetic words clasp, gasp, grasp and hasp; and the second category consists of a single meaning METAL, which corresponds to clasp, hasp and rasp. Secondly, ‘how to differentiate the phonaesthetic words with the same onset/rime’ are summarized as: the phonaesthetic words with the same rime can directly be separated from each other based on the different meanings carried by the different onsets, which is provided by the multi-semantic pattern; the phonaesthetic words with the same onset can be separated mainly by focusing on the different vowels of the rimes, based on Sapir’s(1928) theory pertinent to the mechanisms for phonaesthesia/sound symbolism(e.g. /a/ or /?/ symbolizes something larger, while /i:/symbolizes something smaller).The multi-semantic patterns and differentiation of the morphologically similar phonaesthetic words can not only serve as the reference for other studies on this subject, but can also facilitate the process of teaching and learning English.