A Study Of Syntactic Iconicity In English Based On Relevance Theory

As one type of linguistic iconicity, syntactic iconicity which refers to the natural resemblance between syntactic structure and the conceptual structure in people's mind has already been widely discussed by many cognitive linguists. Previous studies mainly focus on analyzing the iconic features of syntactic structures in the framework of semantics. With recent development of studying it from the pragmatic point of view, its functions have attracted much attention from scholars who have tried to discover its functions in different kinds of language use.From the cognitive pragmatic point of view, a successful communication relies on that the hearer's conceptual world iconizes the speaker's conceptual world to the greatest degree. In order to fulfill this purpose, the speaker in a verbal communication is very inclined to take the most effective and economical ways to express her meaning and convey her intention. Iconic syntax (quantity iconicity, order iconicity and distance iconicity in syntax) is to be perceived as the product of the speaker's best choice of syntactic structures as a part of her most economical and effective means to make her conceptual world iconized by the hearer in his representation world. Therefore, we can deduce that the production and understanding of syntactic iconicity must be completed in a process of ostensive communication. Since Relevance Theory has been regarded as an effective approach to production and comprehension of language, this research aims to interpret syntactic iconicity in English from perspective of Relevance Theory, explaining syntactic iconicity from three aspects including optimal relevance, cognitive context and deductive inference. In this thesis, sentence pairs differ in the number of linguistic signs, differ in the order of linguistic signs and differ in the distance of linguistic signs are compared and analyzed in a series of natural contexts.The explanation of syntactic iconicity based on cognitive pragmatics emphasizes the understanding process of the iconic sentences. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of this thesis is to probe into the understanding mechanism of syntactic iconicity. With a full understanding of how the mechanism works, we are more likely to find out the motivations of the application of syntactic iconicity in our language learning and thus to make syntax learning and improvement of learning ability possible and easier.