| The discussion about the relationship between sound and meaning has lasted for thousands of years ever since Plato times.Generally speaking,there are two major opinions about it,namely,arbitrariness and iconicity.The father of modern linguistics,Ferdinand de Saussure supports the former,and he claims that arbitrariness is the fundamental principle of language.Different from the traditional linguistics,phonosemantics believes that there is a connection between sound and meaning,and their relationship is not arbitrary.Cognitive linguistics,which developed from the late 1980 s,provides a theoretical foundation for the study of phonosemantics.Cognitive linguistics thinks that there is a profound corresponding relationship between the structure of language and the physiological structure,culture,experience and material basis of human beings.This point of view reinforced the hypothesis of phonosemantics.In short,the research on the relationship between the sound and meaning will still be the focus of linguistics.Among all the case studies of phonosemantics,the English phonemes have always caught scholar's eyeballs.For example,some researches indicate that /gl/ bears the sense of shiny;/sl/ bears the sense of smooth or wet.But for /m/,the studies are rare.Therefore,on the basis of previous studies,the thesis tries to find out the senses /m/ carries and the possible connections between the senses.The author collects all words containing letter m and looks up the meaning of these words in Oxford English Dictionary at first.In the process of data collection,the author tries his best to exclude the interference of compound words and affixes,and talks about some onomatopoeic words separately.After selection the author has collected 436 words in total and classified these words into eight groups according to their senses based on prototype theory.They are: 1)words related to “mouth”;2)words related to “move”;3)words related to “change”;4)words related to “cover”;5)words related to “water”;6)words related to “measure”;7)words related to “mind”;8)words related to “human”.By using conceptual metaphor and metonymy,the author analyzes the possible connections between these senses.For the left 104 words,the author also explains the reason behind.The result of the study is: the phoneme /m/ tends to bear eight kinds of senses,and the senses are extended through metaphor and metonymy.This finding not only makes contribution to the future study of phonosemantics,but also provides some hints for brand naming. |
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