Sound And Visual Iconicity In Poetry And Their Stylistic Functions: Chinese And English

The discussion about iconicity has a long history. The archetypes of iconicity in signs and iconicity in literature can be traced back respectively far into the record of Cang Jie's creation of characters in ancient China and the famous literary theory of mimesis in Greek Antiquity. Iconicity theoty was proposed against the principle of arbitrariness. The latter was raised by Saussure, the founding father of modern linguistics, who held that there is no natural bond between signifier and signified, and this was deemed by him as the first principle in linguistics. Contrary to him. Peirce, the famous American philosopher and semiotician. differentiated three sorts of signs: symbol, index, and icon, which are different from each other according to their degree of iconicness. He termed the natural connection between signifier and signified as iconicity and further classified icon into iconic image and iconic diagram.Ever since 1960s, more and more linguists have realized the relation between signifier and signified can never be oversimplified as arbitrariness, and much discussion was conducted on linguistic iconicity. By now, with the progress of cognitive linguistics, great achievements have already been attained, and the study on iconicity has also permeated into various aspects of linguistics. All these have laid the solid theoretic basis for the interdisciplinary research between iconicity and other fields.Based on iconicity' theory of signs, scholars tend to hold that literature is iconic, and it mirrors reality in this way or that. In literature, many crafts are deliberately used, in order to keep the form of literature staying as close as possible to the physical reality described or the mental experience expressed. In other words, they are used to make the form "like" the content to the widest extent. The "likeness" or affinity makes the form and the content as a whole, and renders readers' aesthetic process a more facilitated and art-bounded experience. Although there are still heated disagreements between arbitrariness and iconicity in natural language, as far as concerned literary language, especially language in poetic context, the ubiquity of iconicity has already proved an undoubted fact.As a matter of fact, the study of iconicity in literature is not modem. It has extraordinarily deep traditions in both the explorations of xiang in China and the studies of image or icon in the West. However, most of the explorations and studies are metaphysical speculation in nature. Unlike them, this thesis takes concrete Chinese and English poems as supporting material to discuss iconicity and its stylistic functions. Limited by the space, it is impossible to conduct an iconic study of poetry on every hierarchy of language, which may also impair the depth of the thesis. This thesis carries out a detailed study on the levels of sound iconicity and visual iconicity, because sound pattern and visual form are the most obvious surface features of poetry.To conduct the study, first of all, after the scanning of many poems, especially those from modernist and imagist school, the ones typical of sound iconicity and visual iconicity are selected out for close reading. Based on these concrete poetic texts, analysis is conducted as to how their sound pattern and visual form respectively correspond with their themes or contents in a tacit way. Expatiation is also made as to the relation between the form-content correspondence or iconicity on the one hand and stylistic choice and stylistic expressivity on the other.By the analysis of iconicity in concrete poems, it is again proved that iconicity is an important feature of literary language. After the analysis of this thesis, we can come to the conclusion that the sound and visual forms of poetry imitate both the physical reality and the psychological experience, and that it is by means of the imitation that the artistic pursuit of form-meaning affinity is accomplished. This may provide a new perspective for the study and appreciation of poetry. As the title suggests, this thesis is a study of iconicity and its stylistic functions. Therefore, most important of all, after the analysis of the thesis, we get a theoretic discovery though preliminarily: the iconicity theory on sound and visual levels is one of the important bases or links between the choice of form and the choice of meaning in literature, and that it can be helpfully contributive to the realization of expressivity in texts.