A Tentative Study Of The Relationship Between Iconicity And Metaphor

Iconicity and metaphor are two important fields of study in cognitive linguistics. The study of the relationship between them is of great value in better understanding the mechanisms of language construction and concept operation, which may provide instructive theoretical support for language teaching and learning. However, current studies on the relationship between iconicity and metaphor are limited in number and problematic in understanding. In this thesis, we attempt to provide a systematical exploration to the relationship between iconicity and metaphor.After a literature review of the related studies, we make a distinction between Peircean metaphor and Lakoffian metaphor in Chapter 3, which are often confused, resulting in a barrier for the study concerned. We find that Lakoffian metaphor is much broader in scope and higher in abstractness than Peircean metaphor. In Chapter 4, we explore the relationship between iconicity and metaphor from three perspectives: similarities, differences and interactions. We find that iconicity and metaphor have a lot in common: both are motivated, both are based upon similarities and both are a mapping process. On the other hand, iconicity differs from metaphor in three aspects : (1) iconicity is one of the structuring principles of language, which is mainly concerned with the correspondence between the form and meaning, while metaphor reveals the concept working mechanism, which is mainly concerned with correspondence between more abstract domains or concepts; (2) they are different from each other in the way of representing the human experiences; and (3) iconicity and metaphor are mappings with different kinds of domains involved and different directionality. Then,we explore the interaction between iconicity and metaphor from two perspectives: synchronic and diachronic. Synchronically speaking, the interaction between iconicity and metaphor manifests itself in two aspects. On the one hand, metaphor governs and explains the mechanism underlying iconicity, three principles of which are studied in the context of metaphor, i.e., iconicity of quantity, iconicity of distance, and iconicity of order. On the other hand, iconicity functions as the basis for metaphor in the activation of image-schema upon which metaphor is structured. Diachronically speaking, iconicity and metaphor interact in the development of language: i) the former paves the way for the latter and ii) the latter transforms deep-level iconic units into surface-level conceptual ones.We conclude that the relationship between iconicity and metaphor can be displayed by a cline of abstractness. They are closely related. Iconicity and metaphor are inseparable twins, with one involved in the formation and understanding of the other. On the other hand, metaphor governs iconicity, with the former much broader in coverage and more powerful in explanation than the latter.