A Study Of The Correlation Between Internal Motivation And Vocabulary Learning

The relationship between the signifier and the signified in language sign system has been a controversial issue. Over the past 100 years the view that language is arbitrary has prevailed. However, with the development of linguistic sign theory, linguists and philosophers began to doubt arbitrariness as the basic feature of language and make studies on language motivation. Language motivation is the evidence people get to distinguish or explain the meaning of language signs, reflecting the relation between the signifier and the signified and explaining where the meaning comes from and why the form is like that. First, the relationship between language arbitrariness and motivation is explored in this thesis. Although linguists and scholars have not come to an agreement on this issue, the writer of this thesis believes that language arbitrariness and motivation are complementary rather than contradictory. Arbitrariness refers to the absence of any degree of necessity between language and external world; while motivation refers to the presence of some degree of necessity between the signifier and the signified within the system of language. Motivations in language include external and internal ones. As internal motivations have built up from the gradual development of language and are not always obvious, to see them clearly sometimes needs a special knowledge of a language. This thesis focuses on the internal motivations of English, namely, phonological motivation, morphological motivation and semantic motivation aiming at presenting a systematic profile of internal motivations, which might facilitate vocabulary teaching and second language vocabulary...