A Study Of The Model Of Discourse Understanding From The Perspective Of Iconicity

The argumentation between arbitrariness and iconicity is deeply rooted in thehistory of language studies, which can be traced back to Plato-Aristotelian period. Thetheory of iconicity, as a focus of contemporary academic, occupies an increasinglyimportant position in contemporary linguistics. As an important feature of language,iconicity refers that there exists many similar motivation phenomena betweenlinguistic forms and the objective world, experience structure, cognitive style,conceptual system, and the meaning. Iconicity can be represented in all kinds oflinguistic levels. At present, there have been a lot of iconicity studies concerningabout phonetics, vocabulary, and syntax. Although there are also many researches ondiscourse level, most of them are about the manifestations of iconicity in discourselevel, and few scholars do a research about the concrete application of iconicity to thediscourse understanding.This paper aims to the study of discourse understanding, especially influences ofthe theory of iconicity on discourse understanding. The theory of iconicity plays acritical role in discourse understanding. Only fully grasp the theory of iconicity, wecan understand the cognitive process of discourse understanding. This paper firstexplores the theoretical basis, iconicity theory, which affects discourse understanding,including the historical development of the theory of iconicity, the definition oficonicity and the classification of iconicity theory. Then this paper discusses theembodiments of the theory of iconicity in vocabulary, syntax, and discourse levels. Atthe lexical level, word formation is studied; at the syntactic level, the representationsof various iconicity principles are reflected; at the discourse level, not only theresearch on the representations of various iconicity principles is discussed, but thedevelopment of the discourse of different styles is also reflected. Discussions of thesethree aspects lay the foundation for the construction of the model of discourseunderstanding. Then the author constructs the model of discourse understanding fromiconicity perspective on the basis of the above discussions, and does a furtherexplanation of the model by combining with the data analysis, which explores a newway of discourse understanding for language learners.