Syntactic Iconicity: One Effective Means To Achieve Rhetorical Effects In Literature

The concept of iconicity is put forward in contrast to that of arbitrariness.Linguistic symbols are iconically correspondent to their referents in sound,form and syntactic structure.Linguistic form is a reflection of cognition and experience.Iconicity is the study of the similarity between linguistic form or structure and the concept or conceptual structure it represents.It can be regarded as a sort of analysis and study of language phenomena from a microscopic perspective.Iconicity is based on the observations of cross-languages and typology and it is universal.It provides us with a new perspective of language,from which we can see that language is not entirely arbitrary;it is motivated jointly by non-formal factors such as reality physiology,cognition, semantics,and pragmatics.As an approach in general,the study of iconicity will be contributive to the further understanding of the relationship between language and cognition,and form and meaning as well.As a means,iconicity will facilitate language analysis and make language learning and application easier and more efficient.Since the 20^th century,iconicity has become a heated issue in the academic circle.Many outstanding linguists,say Haiman(1980,1985),Givon(1985),Lyons(1991),and some scholars in China,such as Xu Guozhang(1998),and Wang Yin(1999, 2000,2002,2003) and so on,with the development of functionalism and cognitive science,they have begun to give a relatively deep exploration of relations between forms and meanings of linguistic signs.They all point out that linguistic signs have the special relation with human beings' cognition.There exist similarities between language signs and their referents,and languages are the direct reflections of the outside world.They have studied this topic on several levels:phonetical,lexical,syntactical,and discourse.And at the early stage,the study only focused on phonetical and lexical level.Haiman gives a great contribution in syntactical level.At home,Wang Yin,in Semantic Theory and Language Teaching(2001),and Explorations on Cognitive Linguistics (2005),has made some attempts to study syntactic iconicity.But the application of syntactical iconicity is not expounded deeply.And this thesis aims at the study of the syntactic level, centered on "Syntax Iconicity" and tries to combine syntactic iconicity with rhetorical effects and furthermore,explores the production of rhetorical effects by syntactic iconicity.Haiman(1985) holds the view that the surface form of a sentence iconically diagrams its semantics.Linguistic structures are often similar to non-linguistic diagrams of our thoughts.Languages are like diagrams.Syntactic iconicity, according to Haiman's framework,includes quantity iconicity, order iconicity,distance iconicity and markedness iconicity.Rhetorical effect,is another key point of this thesis.But here the author does not understand it as the traditional way. Rhetoric,in a wide sense,is a process and an action in which cognitive world of language users and their expressions become integrated with the participation of cognition,including the use of language and other linguistic signs,such as visual images and signs,for communication.So,iconicity,in essence, can be seen as one of the rhetorical devices from the cognitive angle.It provides us with a new method to understand the stylistic and rhetoric effects.This point of view is represented in Syntactic Iconicity and its Stylistic Effects in Literature(Nie Xinyan,2002) and On Rhetorical Effects of Iconicity(Song Ranran,2006).The former thesis attached importance on stylistic effects,on the other hand,the latter thesis paid much attention to rhetorical effects,only in a general range.She discussed the rhetorical effects both on phonetical,lexical and syntactical level.But this paper attaches importance to the rhetorical effects specifically on syntactic level in the detailed way in an attempt to make this theory deeper and richer.One point should be stressed is that the examples of chapter three are carefully selected from many famous outstanding works at home and abroad in order to make the author's point much more abroad,comprehensive and persuasive.Two main points are discussed in this paper:the one is that syntactic iconicity is an effective means to analyze the rhetoric effects in literature;the other is the enlightenment in advanced English writing teaching——a new writing teaching concept.Iconicity is neither only a language mechanism nor a simple theoretical hypothesis.It provides us a new perspective to literature creation and appreciation and composition research.