A Study On The Interaction Between Iconicity And Salience In Word Order

The relations amongst the order of linguistic construction, the cognitive sequence of human beings and the outside world are of vital importance in linguistic research and they are important topics in philosophical linguistics.Iconicity in language, projection of the outside world into the linguistic construction through human cognition, has long been a subject of heated discussion for philosophers and linguists both at home and abroad, and remains an area of substantial academic enqury today. In China, the origin of Chinese characters is revealed in the saying that ancient Chinese people took into account the parts of their own body and the things around them when they created those characters. In the West, discussion of linguistic iconicity originated from the well-known Greek philosopher Plato. The term iconicity, however, was put forward by the American philosopher and logician Charles Pierce as late as 1930s.Research concerning the iconicity of language has been focused on the syntax. And syntactic iconicity was classified into element iconicity and relation iconicity. With regard to relation iconicity, scholars in China and the West have put forward a number of iconicity principles such as the principle of sequence, the principle of distance, the principle of topic and so on.The present thesis is written on the basis of these previous studies, which have provided a strong foundation for subsequent scholarly enquiry. According to my knowledge, however, these previous studies have failed to address some significant issues relating to the mechanism of word order formation. First, the above-mentioned iconicity principles are mainly based on English and Chinese syntactic research, with few studies having been conducted in lexicology and text. The conclusions of these studies are therefore not immediately applicable to lexicology and text in English or Chinese. More importantly, scholars have laid great emphasis on iconicity whilst overlooking the salience of word order. To answer this omission, this thesis argues the importance of salient word order. More over, this thesis demonstrates that iconicity and salience are interactive in word order. That is to say, iconicity in word order has hitherto been explored but salience in word order has been neglected, and the mechanism of word order formation remains unknown up to now.Following this, this thesis is entitled A Study on the Interaction between Iconicity and Salience in Word Order:With Reference to Chinese and English. In this thesis, word order is examined in terms of iconic word order and salient word order in accordance with the iconicity principle of sequence in Cognitive Linguistics. In conducting this study, research methods such as abductive, static and dynamic, macro and micro approaches have been employed to find out the mechanism of word order formation. In the end, the thesis comes to the conclusion that iconic word order and salient word order are interactive, and the former is fundamental and natural in the formation of Chinese and English expressions from lexicology and syntax to text. The interaction between iconicity and salience in Chinese and English word order gives birth to three orders:iconic word order, salient word order and free word order. The iconic word order plays a more important role than the salient word order in Chinese while in English, the situation is reversed. The iconic word order and salient word order form a continuum, with free word order in the midst. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a preface, introducing the thesis topic, working definitions, research methods. Chapters Two, Three and Four make up the body of the study, elaborating on the interaction between iconicity and salience in word order in lexicology, syntax and text respectively. Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis, summing up the new findings and pointing out what problems to be solved subsequently.This thesis will lead to deeper studies of iconicity theory in Cognitive Linguistics and it is of practical value in word order translation and teaching.