An Investigation Of Iconicity In English Words In Pairs

With the characteristics of semantic unity and structural fixedness, English words in pairs are usually regarded as the result of conventions. Traditional research into them is mainly confined to their internal structure and grammatical functions. The external factors, that is, the natural connection between the structure and the objective reality, are often ignored. The recent development of cognitive science has cast some lights on language. The widely-accepted idea that language is an autonomous system has met with an unprecedented challenge. A great amount of research has occurred in the last two decades regarding the iconic aspects of language, which have been verified to be prevalent at all possible levels from phonology through text. While the connection between English words in pairs and iconicity has caused the attention of scholars both home and abroad, their research is far from systematic and comprehensive. With experientialism as its philosophical foundation, this thesis focuses on discussing the iconic aspects reflected in English words in pairs, and finally reveals that the language structure is the mapping of human's cognitive or conceptual structure and the structural complexity reflects the complexity of human's mental representation. On the one hand, the study is with no doubt to deepen our overall understanding of the structure of English words in pairs at the theoretical level; on the other hand, it is conducive to the study of linguistic typology, therefore, it can promote language teaching and language acquisition. It is thus of practical values.English words in pairs have a high degree of iconicity, which is reflected in the following four principles: quantitative iconicity, distance iconicity, order iconicity, and metaphor. Firstly, it is concerned with the quantitative iconicity, which involves the correspondence between linguistic form and conceptual complexity or familiarity or predictability of the referent it represents. It is not difficult to see that quantitative iconicity is pervasively present in the larger size of English words in pairs by repeating the same word, using the synonymous word, adding the plural form and some rhetorical devices such as alliteration and rhyme.Secondly, distance iconicity maintains that the linguistic distance between expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between them. Although the reflection of distance iconicity in English words in pairs is not very strikingly remarkable, it is of universal...