The Theory Of Iconicity And Its Application To English Teaching

Throughout the history, arbitrariness put forward by Saussure has been regarded as one of the most designing features of language. Saussure claimed that there is no interrelationship between the signifier and signified, or such relationship can't be testified but conventional.In the 1940s, the famous philosopher Pierce, founder of American practicalism and semiotics, distinguished icon, index and symbol. Peirce (1940) pointed out"Syntax in every language mirrors logic iconicity by means of conventional rules."The most distinguished scholar studying syntactic iconicity is Haiman. He published two essays in 1980 and 1983, and two books in 1985 named Natural Syntax and Iconicity in Syntax, which explored the iconicity on syntactic level in details. Haiman(1985)concluded:"The surface form of a sentence iconically diagrams its semantics."and"Linguistic structures are often similar to non-linguistic diagrams of our thoughts. Languages are like diagrams."Haiman was the most influential scholar who brought iconicity into a new period.In recent two or three decades, with the development of language and cognition studies, people find that language is not completely arbitrary, and there is a certain relationship between language structure and experiential structure. Cognitive linguistics claims that language is shaped or at least influenced by our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it (Ungerer & Schmid, 2001). Functionalists have the similar viewpoint with cognitive linguists and acknowledge that language is not discrete or autonomous, whose description must be based on cognitive processes.At home, the famous linguistic scholar Xu Guozhang (1988) challenged arbitrariness in his essay The Issue on Arbitrary Nature of Language. He pointed out that arbitrariness and convention were not the same thing.…the things constrained by society are the result of social consensus. They are not arbitrarily created. Other linguists like Hu Zhuanglin and Wang Yin also support the iconic...