| The discussion about the relationship between sound and its meaning has been existing for thousands of years ever since Plato times.Generally speaking,there are two major opinions about it,namely arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness.The father of modern linguistics,Ferdinand de Saussure supports the former,he thinks that there is no connection between the sound and its meaning,the relationship between them is arbitrary.In this thesis,the author talks about a new branch,that is Phonosemantics,which talks about the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning.It is different from the traditional linguistics,phonosemantics believes that there is a connection between the sound of a word and its meaning,they are not arbitrary.With the appearance of the cognitive linguistics in the late 1980 s,it strengthens the view of phonosemantics.Cognitive linguists think that language has deep congruent relationship with the objective world.Even though phonosemantics isn’t the mainstream linguistics in the field of linguistics,a lot of linguists,such as George Lakoff pays much attention to it and it has drawn many scholars’ attention.With the development of the research,more and more researches show that the sound does carry the meaning.For instance,/i/ carries the meaning of small;/fl/ carries the meaning of flying or flowing movement.What about the consonant cluster /st/? Does it also carry the meaning? What kind of meaning does it carry? What is the relationship of those meanings? With those questions,the author collected all words containing the English letters st from the Online Etymology Dictionary and looked up the meaning of these words in Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary.In the end,the author collected 291 words in total and classified these words into five categories according to their meanings.They are: 1)words related to “stand”;2)words related to “fixed”;3)words related to “pierce”;4)words related to “prevent”;5)words related to “static”.Then the author analyzes those five major meanings and their meaning extension by using three mechanisms,they are categorization,metaphor and metonymy.For the remaining words which don’t carry the five major meanings,the author classifies some of them according to their meanings and lists some words which can’t be categorized so far.Finally,the author talks about the practical values of the study to the English word teaching and brand naming.In this thesis,the author wants to prove the consonant cluster /st/ does carry some meanings and to further explain the branch of phonosemantics.The author wishes that her findings not only can give some information for the future study of phonosemantics,but also can make a contribution to the fields of English word teaching and brand naming. |
PDF Full Text Request