The Comparative Analysis Of Distance Iconicity In English News And Its Chinese Translation

Since Saussure proposed the arbitrariness as an important feature of language, the argument that whether language is arbitrary or not becomes prevailing. The linguists in the fields of functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and transformational-generative linguistics air their different views on this topic. In fact, there exist iconicity linking the language and cognition i.e. the linguistic construction reflects the concept construction of human. Haiman divides the iconicity of linguistic elements into isomorphism and motivation, and the motivation is further divided into distance iconicity, quantity iconicity, order iconicity, and markedness iconicity.This thesis chooses distance iconicity as the object of study and states the present research of iconicity and distance iconicity at home and abroad. And then basing on the theories proposed by Haiman, Givon and Jespersen etc. and taking documents and comparative analysis as the methods of study, it analyzes the distance iconicity of English news and its Chinese translation in the terms of noun modifiers, causation, double-object construction and euphemism and finds the similarity and difference of distance iconicity in English and Chinese. Furthermore, the reasons that bring this kind of divergence are studied. Finally it draws the conclusion that the English construction is translated into the Chinese counterpart construction, and the distance iconicity is remained. If Chinese is lack of the counterpart or the literal translation is felt uncomfortable, distance iconicity gives way to expression habit and the smooth meaning should be the primary consideration.