Speech Act Analysis Of The Iconicity In Poetic Discourse

Iconicity theory, ranking as one of the important theories in semiotics and cognitive linguistics, has been under extensive discussion at home and abroad. With great efforts, linguists have described a large quantity of iconic phenomena in language, generalized many iconicity principles and fully developed the theoretical system of iconicity. With the development of iconicity theory, many Chinese scholars have set out to combine iconicity theories with poetic understanding and translation and have made great achievements. This thesis will make a systematic study of the iconicity in Chinese and English poems, which, the author hopes, will shed new light on the appreciation of Chinese and English poems.The publishing of Literary Pragmatics edited by Roger D.Sell in 1991 changed the situation that the former pragmatic researches only focus on the spoken language, but neglect written language, especially literary works; this publishing symbolized that the"literature pragmatics"officially entered the linguistic research field. In the past 30 years, domestic and foreign scholars have made achievements on the study of applying linguistic methods to literature analysis, which results in the rapid development of literature pragmatics and the publishing of related monographs. However, the research of poetic analysis unilaterally from the pragmatic angle was few. Poetry is the most refined form of literary arts and its material is language. Therefore, poetry is a way to express the poet's illocutionary act. However, poetry also has its unique pattern distinguished from other languages. Since it is the text that the poets and readers base themselves on to communicate, it can not only express poet's intention by sound but also by appearance. Because of these, when poets arrange poems, many of them use the sound or visual iconicity to convey their illocutionary force. This thesis will use the Austin's speech act theory to analysis the iconicity in poetic discourse, attempting to throw light on the appreciation and research of the iconic rhetoric poems.