Syntactic Iconicity And Its Rhetorical Effects On English Language Reading And Writing

As a hot topic in cognitive linguistics, iconicity is put forward contrast to arbitrariness on the basis of"reality--cognition--language". This theory believes that linguistic form represents human's cognition and experience. It mainly focuses on the relation between language form and its meaning, that is to say, the iconic relationship between the linguistic form or structure and the concept or the conceptual structure that the linguistic form conveys. Studying iconicity can help us further understand the relation between language and cognition, and the relation between form and meaning. It can also make us analyze and learn language more easily and efficiently.However, the father of modern linguistics, Saussure believes that language is a system of signs, there is no internal relation between the form and the meaning. The linguistic signs are arbitrary and arbitrariness is a fundamental feature of language. Because of his great influence, arbitrariness governs linguistic theory in almost 20th century.Because of the development of functionalism and cognitive science, iconicity attracts linguists'attention once again since the late of 20th century. Many linguists have begun to find that the relation between forms and meanings of language signs is not arbitrary completely rather there is necessary relation between linguistic structure and cognition. Linguists such as Lyons(1991),Givon (1985),Greenberg (1966) and Haiman (1980,1985) point out that there are some similarities between Language signs and their meanings. Many outstanding linguists begin to study iconic phenomena at different levels, such as phonetics, lexicon, syntax and discourse. Among these linguists, the most famous is John Haiman. In his books Natural Syntax (1985a) and Iconicity in Syntax (1985b), he analyzes and studies syntactic iconicity, which brings the research on iconicity into a new section. He believes that the relation between linguistic structure and our conceptual structure is iconic; the surface structure of sentence represents its semantics. According to Haiman's opinion, syntactic iconicity includes quantity iconicity, order iconicity, distance iconicity. These iconicity principles can be applied to many areas, especially language teaching and learning. Because they can help students understand the essence of language effectively.Rhetoric which is discussed in this thesis is a broad definition and it refers to a process and an action where it explains how language users use language to express the outside and themselves with the participation of cognition.This thesis tries to show a systematic study on the principles of syntactic iconicity and the production of their rhetorical effects. Then the author applies syntactic iconicity as well as its rhetorical effects to English language teaching and learning to help students arouse their interest in learning English, understand the essence of English language and improve their English reading and writing ability.