A Study Of Iconicity In Song Ci And Its Representations In The English Translations

This thesis concerns itself with a research on the iconicity in Song Ci and its representations in the English translations within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. As a unique form of classical Chinese poetry. Song Ci has always been one of the research focuses. Previous studies have made some achievements from different perspectives; however, few of them have probed into Song Ci systematically from the angle of the mutual interaction between language and thought. Therefore, this issue is still worthy of our further exploration.Cognitive Linguistics stands for a research paradigm of linguistics which lays emphasis on analyzing the relationship between language and thought. As a vital component of Cognitive Linguistics, iconicity theory focuses on the close link between language and thought mainly by observing the interaction between language structure and cognitive structure. On account of that, this thesis approaches the iconicity in Song Ci and its representations in the English translations within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and is specifically devoted to the following two questions:(1) what are the identifications of iconicity in the source texts of Song Ci? (2) how is the iconicity in the source texts of Song Ci represented in the English translations?This thesis is a comparative study. It also identifies itself as a qualitative study, and the specific data include the source texts collected from 300 Song Ci and the target ones translated by Xu Yuanchong, Yang Xianyi, Lin Yutang and Xu Zhongjie. It is concluded that (1) iconicity identifies itself as two subtypes in the source texts of Song Ci, namely, imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity. The former consists mainly of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism while the latter is chiefly concerned with order iconicity, quantity iconicity and symmetrical iconicity. (2) As far as the data examined in this thesis, onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are both well represented in Lin Yutang’s and Xu Yuanchong’s translations. Order iconicity finds its proper representation in Lin Yutang’s translation. Xu Yuanchong’s translation gives closer representations to both quantity and symmetrical iconicity.The significance of this thesis is mainly manifested in the following two aspects. First, the identifications of iconicity in Song Ci, to some extent, deepen the understanding of the source texts of Song Ci. Second, the comparison of the representations of the iconicity in translations shed some light on the appreciation and translation criticism of Song Ci.