A Study On Poetic Image Language

Poetic image is the essential factor and soul of poetry. Language tends to be the carrier of the poetic image. Actually, the process of creating a poem is a kind of process in which the poet will select suitable concrete objects to be the poetic images, and construct the poetic image language so as to express his subjective feelings vividly. Different from the previous poetic image researches that were mainly carried out from the perspective of analyzing artistic characteristics and artistic effect, ours is a discussion about the poetic image language based on Chinese and English poetry. In this paper, by using the theories of general linguistics, cultural linguistics, rhetoric, contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics and so on, we make a multi-dimensional study on the poetic image language.By means of the linguistic analysis, we think that the correspondence to the poetic image is mainly the concrete object nouns or noun phrases. When used in poetry, those sensate nouns or noun phrases become the image words or phrases. In poetry, the poetic image language can be undertaken by an image word or an image phrase, can also be undertaken by a non-noun phrase or a sentence with an image word or phrase as the principal part.From the perspective of literature, the poetic image language is always considered as an artistic device of creating artistic image; on the other hand, it is regarded as an artistic language of conveying aesthetic information and aesthetic feeling from the perspective of linguistics. The poetic image language is based on the general language, and the realization of its aesthetic value must be aided by the conceptual meaning of the general language. Meanwhile, it is different from the general language, and it is the aesthetic variation of the general language in the aspects of pronunciation, meaning, grammar and so on. The aesthetic variation is notably embodied in the innovative collocation between the head image word or phrase undertaking the principal part of the poetic image language and the other adjectives, verbs, etc.The poetic image language is of concreteness, metaphorization and nationality. The poets make use of the metaphorical way to make the concrete poetic image language be the carrier of their subjective emotion. According to the relation between the head image words or phrases and national culture, the poetic image language can be divided into inherited poetic image language and innovative poetic image language. Either the inherited poetic image language or the innovative one, is of nationality, and must be conditioned by the national culture. The poetic image language is of object-describing function, emotion- describing function and aesthetic function. It combines both object description and emotion description to express subjective feeling and abstruse philosophy. The poetic image language has abundant aesthetic characteristics and distinct aesthetic function, and the aesthetic feature is its intrinsic quality. The poetic image language brings people both outer and inner aesthetic feeling and inspiration.The poets make use of the metaphorical thinking mechanism to construct the poetic image language. The metaphorical thinking is based on the similarities between human beings and objects, also objects and objects; therefore it obeys the rule that all the things in the world are related to each other. By using the thinking operation method of intuitive association or supernormal imagination, the poets construct the similarities between the subjective feelings and objective things so as to find the exact objective correspondences of their feelings, thus the metaphorical poetic image language is constructed.Stimulated by the outer world, the poets generate the creation motivation, which enables them to organize the inner speech of the poetic image language. The process of constructing and organizing the inner speech of the poetic image language is a kind of process in which the poets, conditioned by the national culture, appropriately select the objective things as the carriers of images, and construct the poetic image language so as to express their feelings.Once the inner speech of the poetic image language has been constructed, it must be externalized to be sounds or words, and then the whole process of constructing the poetic image language can be completely finished. By the aid of the external phonetic device, semantic device and grammatical device, etc., the poets will finish the transformation of expression from the inner speech to the metaphorical external speech.The meaning of the poetic image language is of multi-layer, polysemy, and fuzziness. The understanding of the deep meaning of the poetic image language is conditioned by the cultural context. In poetry, the head image words or phrases seem to be pretty crucial. In order to understand the deep meaning of the poetic image language correctly, the cultural context which the head image words or phrases depend on must be taken into consideration.The semantic understanding of the poetic image language can be aided by the relation of the two parameters in the linguistic coordinates. In the semantic relation, the hyponymy of poems works as the abscissa of the semantic understanding of the poetic image language, while various cultural meanings of the head image words or phrases as the ordinate. In the coordinates, the semantic syntagmatic relation and the semantic paradigmatic relation interact with each other, which thereby composes the great aesthetic sense of the poetic image language.According to our viewpoint that the choice and understanding of the head image words or phrases must be conditioned by the cultural context, we make a contrastive analysis of the head image words or phrases of expressing"Love","Joy","sadness","Ideal and Aspiration"in Chinese and English poetry.