1.3   Sound and Meaning

A word is a symbol that stands for something else in the world. Each of the world's cultures has come to agree that certain sounds will represent certain persons, things, places, properties(属性), processes and activities external to the language system. This symbolic connection(象征关系) is almost always arbitrary(任意的), and there is 'no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thing or an idea and the actual thing and idea itself (Lodwig and Barrett 1973). A dog is called a dog not because the sound and the three letters that make up the word automatically suggest the animal in question. It is only a symbolic connection. The relationship between them is conventional(约定俗称的) because people of the same speech community (言语社团)have agreed to refer to the animal with this cluster (束；串)of sounds. In different languages the same concept can be represented by different sounds. Woman, for example, becomes Frau in German, femme in French and fu nii in Chinese. On the other hand, the same sound [mi:t] is used to mean meet; meat, mete(边界；界石). Knight and night, though denoting entirely different things, yet have the same sound.