Iconicity And Coherence In Literary Text

Text coherence, a complex and long-studied issue, has been much discussed with considerable achievements. From different perspectives, theories have been established, such as, Halliday and Hasan study this issue from register and cohesion, Van Dijk from the angle of macrostructure, Widdowson from the pragmatical aspect of illocutionary act, Mann & Thompson from rhetorical structure theory, and Danes & Fries from thematic progression. However, with the development of linguistics, text coherence can be discussed from a new angle—iconicity.Iconicity, or motivation, one of the important theories in semiotics and cognitive linguistics, has gained great popularity both at home and abroad. Linguists have described a great many iconic phenomena in language and generalized many iconicity principles, especially iconicity principles in syntax. As a matter of fact, this issue can be traced back to Charles Sanders Peirce, who identified three different ways that a sign can stand for its referent:icon, index, and symbol. Based on Peircean trichotomy, Haiman divides icons into imagic icons and diagrammatic icons. As a leading figure in this issue, Haiman makes an elaborate and systematic study of iconicity and has brought the research into a new stage. Nanny and Fischer also divide iconicity into imagic iconicity which is further divided into oral, tactile, visual iconicity, and diagrammatic iconicity which is subdivided into structural and semantic iconicity. Here, metaphoric iconicity is grouped into semantic iconicity. In recent years, several scholars begin to combine text coherence with iconicity. studying text coherence from iconicity. Based on the previous findings and the theories of Haiman and Nanny & Fischer, this thesis studies the approaches to iconicity as a device for text coherence from the aspects of imagic iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity and metaphoric iconicity.This dissertation adopts the method of text analysis and qualitative method. All the samples of text analysis are from literature works, not confined to a given type. In imagic iconicity, there is a more or less direct one-to-one relation between the linguistic sign and the signified. Imagic iconicity plays an important role in poetic language. As to this iconicity, the paper focuses on two aspects:oral iconicity and visual iconicity. Oral iconicity and visual iconicity in poetry not only add beauty to the whole text, but also are a representation of the theme of poems and make the whole text cohesive in organization and coherent in meaning. Diagrammatic iconicity refers to the resemblance between the structure of linguistic signs arid that of human experience or concept. As far as diagrammatic iconicity is concerned, sequence iconicity and symmetrical iconicity are discussed in detail. Metaphors are the mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Cognitive linguists believe that conceptual metaphors are the basic ways for people to know the world. People's conceptual system is metaphorical. And text in print is a concrete reflection of the person's conceptual system. So conceptual metaphor is a guide for text-formation, and thus, is a means of coherence.