A Study Of The English Subjunctive From The Perspective Of Iconicity

For many decades, linguistic arbitrariness is the conqueror in language researches. However, as cognitive science is becoming a new perspective to investigating numerous issues in many fields, Cognitive Linguistics applies this way of thinking into linguistic studies and has made many achievements. It concerns about human’s cognition participation in their language acquiring and practicing processes. They said that language is neither arbitrary nor preset in human minds. Human cognition couldn’t be separated from language acquiring process and lots of evidences and motivations have been found in their researches.Linguists were constantly trying to find the motivation in language, namely, the evidence of why human language has developed like it is now. They are not arbitrary but correlated with people’s cognitive system with hints found in different layers such as language form, language meaning, and language use.Iconicity holds a point that language mirrors people’s conceptual structure and their physical as well as social experience. In this sense, language forms could be explained or there is a relation between the signified and signifier. This thesis sticks to this argumentation and tries to apply it to the demanding analysis of the English Subjunctive which has caused many disputes on its form, subcategories, application context or even on the existence of the English Subjunctive. It aims to explain the syntactic form of the English Subjunctive by Iconicity Theory in different perspectives and tries to propose a different viewpoint on these hot issues.Important research findings of the English Subjunctive are given in this thesis including the hot debates on the classification and existence of the English Subjunctive as well as the newly-born cognitive survey on the English Subjunctive. It claims four subcategories of the English Subjunctive based on their different cognition patterns, its pragmatic uses and for the convenience of analyzing English Subjunctive from the perspective of iconicity. They are Unreal Subordinate Clause Subjunctive, Modal Verb Subjunctive, Mandative Subjunctive and Formulative Subjunctive. Unreal Subordinate Clause Subjunctive includes "If conditionals, concessive clauses,"wish" or some other typical structures transferring the unreal meaning are all inclusive in this type. Modal Verb Subjunctive involves main clause of unreal "if conditional and the subjunctive with modal verb+present perfect. Mandative Subjunctive could express the pragmatic meanings such as command, suggestion, and requirement. Formulative subjunctive includes the simple sentences transferring wishes, curses or forbiddances. Moreover, they are fixed expression and sometimes related to the supernatural powers. The qualitative methods are mainly applied to this research and the corpus for iconic investigation comes from literary works, newspaper, magazines, and interviews.Analyzing the iconicity of the English Subjunctive is an adventurous academic attempt which is also a path to prove the universality of iconicity theory. To prove the feasibility of iconicity of the English Subjunctive is the main purpose of this essay. Moreover, the findings could be beneficial for the English teachers and learners to improve their learning effectiveness. As soon as the motivation of a language structure is revealed, it will turn out to be easier to acquire it.