Sound Symbolism Of Chinese

The phenomenon of sound symbolism in Chinese is explored primarily in this research.The arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is known as a fundamental principle in modern linguistic theory.Based on the fruitful researches on the nature of non-arbitrary relations between linguistic sounds and meanings,this study aims at investigating the existence of sound-symbolic patterns in the Chinese lexicon and exploring the underlying mechanism.In this study,experiment 1 and experiment 2 are designed to explore foreign language speakers‘ and Chinese native speakers‘ sensitivity to the correspondence of sound and meanings in Chinese single-syllable antonymic pairs respectively.And descriptive statistical analysis and t-test are adopted to analyze the raw data in order to verify the existence of sound symbolism in Chinese and the sound-meaning patterns.The major findings are presented hereon.Firstly,sound-symbolic correspondence exists in the Chinese lexicon,and foreign language speakers are sensitive to them.Through an overall analysis of research data,it is found that foreign language speakers can guess the meaning of noncongate words with better than chance success.Secondly,tone is an important criterion in matching sound-symbolism correspondence for subjects.By reversing the tones on the words in those pairs whose members differ in tone,it is found that the change in tones makes it easier for the subjects to match the correct Chinese words.Furthermore,it seems that the tones assigned to some words are not the ideal ones from some foreign language speakers‘ points of view.For example,they prefer low level tone on the Chinese equivalents of coarse and wide rather than the original tone,high level tone.Thirdly,the patterns of sound-meaning correspondence that Chinese native speakers may follow are concluded as the threefold: vowel iconicity,consonants iconicity and tone iconicity.More specifically,Chinese vowel [?] is associated with ―big‖ category meanings and [i] with ―small‖ category;the aspirated consonants and the grave nasal [m] is favored to be ascribed ―big‖ category meanings while unaspirated consonants and the acute nasal [n] relate with ―small‖ category meanings;subjects prefer to use the high level tone for the ―small‖ category meanings and the falling tone for ―big‖ category meanings.Finally,in the process of sound and meaning association,humans exploit mental embodiment and metaphoric character to conduct the interaction between mind and the external world.They use the correspondence of sound and meaning to imitate the natural sounds,shape or motion of objects,and human‘s mentality and thoughts.Furthermore,tone is not the sign of arbitrariness by historical accident,but reflects the essential feature of object from different perspectives.The use of tone reflects people‘s cognitive achievement of the world.The motivation of tones lies in their influence on the motion and state of vocal organ by means of their own tonal features in the process of pronunciation in order to imitate features of object more accurately and vividly.