Lconicity In Ancient Chinese Texts

Shiji, or The Records of the Historian, is highly rated by contemporary Chinese linguists as the ideal epitome of the relative maturity of ancient Chinese in that it signifies the first big leap, from a terse and frigid Pre-Qin linguistic style, towards a more fluid and temporally logic one, more akin to modern Chinese. Shiji language witnesses significant linguistic progress in Qin-Han Period, especially in vocabulary enrichment and syntactic transformation. Thanks to its linguistic importance, Shiji promises huge potential and prospect for cognitive linguistic studies, which, for instance, approach Shiji language from the perspective of iconicity, one of the thoroughly discussed and developed cognitive linguistic constructs with universal applicability and productivity.Despite the said prospect, contemporary linguistic studies on Shiji, from the modern cognitive perspective, do not abound. Iconicity theorization, in particular, is under-utilized. As an attempt to contribute to the yet-to-be-plowed fertile field, this study carries out an iconicity-angled analysis of Shiji language, focusing mainly on its syntax, in order to reveal the iconic motivation for evolution on the part of ancient Chinese with scientific methods of theorization and application based on works from such pioneers as Jakobson (1965), Haiman (1980,1985a,1985b), Tai (1985), Bybee (1985), Givon (1985), Newmeyer (1992,1998) and etc. Linguistic iconicity derives from the semiotic theories of Peircean icons. In line with the general stance of cognitive linguistics that language reflects the way how people conceptualize the world with bodily experience, iconicity proponents claim that linguistic forms frequently mirror objects and relations that they signify in the actual world and/or in the virtual world within human cognition as a reaction to the physical world. In this study, the theorization of hypo-iconicity, iconicity of sequence, iconicity of markedness, and iconicity of cohesion is employed to account for the cognitive motivation behind a variety of distinctive language phenomena in ancient Chinese, epitomized by the text of Shiji:a) imagic, diagrammatic and metaphoric word formation in Small Seal Script, b) temporally sequenced syntactic norms and exceptions, c) marked syntactic sequence, d) intra-sentential and inter-sentential repetition, e) coining of multi-syllabic verb constructions, f) the passive voice, g) negation and double negation, and h) metaphoric syntax.Findings of this study suggest:a) iconicity theories, in general, are highly applicable to linguistic studies on Shiji in terms of accounting for the cognitive motivation behind language evolution; b) relations of hypo-iconicity are more applicable to morphology in ancient Chinese than alphabetic languages; c) iconicity of temporal sequence, represented by Tai's Principle of Temporal Sequence (PTS) and Principle of Temporal Scope (PTSC), proves to be the single most significant principle propelling diachronic syntactic change in ancient Chinese, as is evidenced in the comparison between Shiji and Pre-Qin Period texts; d) iconicity of markedness and iconicity of cohesion are both capable of accounting for certain unique, compared to the English language norms at least, syntactic structures in Shiji and ancient Chinese in general; e) the concrete way metaphoric iconicity expresses itself in Shiji syntax is different from the abstract way in English, in that the former is often syntactically marked whereas the latter usually unmarked.In a word, this study demonstrates that iconicity theories can provide fresh insights into linguistic studies on Shiji, and, by legitimate extension, ancient Chinese texts in general. Future studies of the same nature shall prove as productive as the present research thanks to the power of iconicity theorization per se.