A Phonosemantic Study Of The Phoneme /b/ In English

Phonosemantics is a discipline aimed at studying the relationship between sound and meaning.The development history is short and the theoretical basis is relatively weak.The rise of cognitive linguistics in the late eighties of the twentieth century has provided an opportunity for the development of phonosenmantics.Especially in recent years,foreign linguists have devoted themselves to the study of cognitive motivations in it.These scholars believe that,to some extent,language can map the way of human thinking and there exists a deep level of correspondence between human language and the objective world.The non-arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and meaning and the arbitrariness of Saussure's co-exist in the history of language research,attracting more and more language researchers to study this problem.The connection between sound and meaning of phonosenmantics advocates that the sound does carry a certain meaning to a certain extent.For example,"gl-" carries the meaning of shiny and the common words are: gleam,glint,glisten,glare,and glam.Then the author envisages whether phoneme /b/ also contain some meanings? If so,what are these meanings? What are the relationships between them? How are the meanings extended and developed? With these questions,the author collects all the words containing the phoneme /b/ from the Online Etymology Dictionary.During the process of collecting words,the author excludes the compound words(eg: greenback;butterfingers)and the derived word(eg: brave;bravery).In dealing with the words with affixes(eg: be-;bi-)the author does not analyze the words that contain some affixes one by one,but treats affixes as research objects by some sample words.In order to ensure the objectivity of data,the author makes the morpheme as the unit to find the original meaning according to the Online Etymology Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.Contrasting the Online Etymology Dictionary,this paper finds that there are 452 words relatively concentrate in six categories of meaning.These six categories are:(1)"round";(2)"swell";(3)"break";(4)"sound";(5)"big" and(6)"barrier".After further analysis of these categories,the author finds that some of the above-mentioned main domains can be further divided into different sub-domains.For example,words related to the meaning of round can be divided into a curving shape domain;a completely round shape domain and shaped like a circle domain.These main domains and sub-domains are interconnected in an intricate way.Based on the theory of family resemblance,cognitive metaphor and cognitive metonymy,this paper analyzes the possible network and extension process between these main domains and sub-domains.In addition,the author finds that there also exist 193 words related to human body parts.The author explains the mapping between human body parts and their function and action.And then according to the positional attributes of human body the author explains the affix(be-;ab-;ob-;sub-;ambi-)words.For those 111 words which can not be classified into the above categories,the author also analyzes the relationship of these words.The purpose of this paper is to prove that phoneme /b/ does contain some meanings and to explain the development and extension of these meanings from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Finally,the study puts the implementation into English vocabulary learning.Taking the English textbooks(PEP)in primary and middle school as the example,the author collects all the words containing phoneme /b/.There are totally 340 words and 297 words can be classified.From this statistical result we can see that it has a certain feasibility to establish a vocabulary meaning extension network in English vocabulary learning from the perspective of phonosemantics.At last,this research also provides some reference value for the study of cognitive phonosematics in the future.