earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to study the sound symbolism of English stop consonants ( /p/, /t/, /k/ ) based on the hypothesis that language contains many sound-symbolic elements. For the sake of this purpose, this study shows the evidence that there is a sound symbolism of "smallness" in the English stop consonants through the analysis of many words(especially, one-syllable ones) and finally shows that there are additional ways using the feature [+voiced], the segments [s-], [i], [-le] to symbolize the same meaning in spite of the fact that there must be different linguistic and psycho-cultural points of view in making the mental image of "smallness". Though the current study of sound symbolism contains many inherent problems, it could make a contribution to the English education when we build a more systematic model of sound symbolism.