Linking Sound And Content

The debate on the iconicity and arbitrariness of language has been raging on for many years. For those who believe in the iconicity of language, poetry has been investigated again and again because of the fact that the sound in poetry is often deliberately patterned by the author to enhance the meaning.This thesis examined the relationship between sound and content in English poetry by using a schematized method. It sustained that there was a systematic correspondence between the sound and meaning in English poetry. The Method proposed in this study described this relationship more comprehensively and thoroughly. This method could also be applied to the translation of English poetry.The previous studies which intended to schematize the relations between sound and meaning in poetry (Hrushovski, 1980; Leech, 1969; Wellek & Warren 1966; Hinton et al, 1994)more or less ignored the distinction between the quality of sound and the quantity of sound and many also failed to account for the differences between acoustic features and articulatory features of sound.In the present study, however, a new typology has been proposed to get rid of these confusions with concrete examples as evidence from English poetry. Moreover, with regard to the application of the scheme, the notion of phonosemantic equivalence was proposed. It argued that the realization of equivalence in poetry translation was based on the priority of the equivalence between the ways in which the meanings were evoked by the sonic arrangements.