On The Cognitive Motivation Of Phonology

Phonosemantics intends to study the relation between sound and meaning. As a new discipline, it has a short history, but its sound-meaning debate may date from thousands of years ago Plato times. Contrary to traditional linguistics, Phonosemantics states that there is a correlation between sound and meaning, and this relation is not arbitrary. The emergence of cognitive linguistics in late1980s has consolidated the theory of phonosemantics, which advocates that there is a deep corresponding relation between language and the objective world. Although the stance of phonosemantics is opposite to the "arbitrariness" of mainstream linguistics, more and more linguists are paying close attention to this branch of learning.The study of phonosemantics shows that, to some extent, sound bears meaning, such as sl means the downward movement unaffected by outside world. Then what about b and p? Do they bear any meaning? If they do, what meanings do they bear? Attempting to answer these questions, this thesis tries to have a research on the cognitive motivation of phonology of b, p initialized monosyllabic words. Firstly, the writer will pick out all the541monosyllabic words initialized with b and p from Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (OALECD); then through meaning analysis of these words, the writer has found that seven semantic domain words are quite disproportional (263). They are Group A:bump, Group B: ball, Group C:break, Group D:brake, Group E:round, Group F:blow and Group G:birth. Hence, owing to the concentrated seven semantic domains, the writer supposes that they are related with b and p, and they are motivated. Then in accordance with motivation analysis, it has been found that the internal motivation:the articulation and its procedure of b and p together with the external motivation:content-form relation and metonymy jointly motivate this phenomenon.This thesis does not attempt to establish a standpoint that totally runs counter to Saussure, but only tries to prove that b and p bear meaning, and the writer hopes it is of help for the further study of this field.