A Study Of Rhetorical Iconicity In Advertising Language

As one of the elements of advertising, language can be said to be the soul of advertising. Thus more attention has been paid to advertising language. Many scholars have made great contributions to this research from the perspectives of semiotic approach, systematic-functional approach, pragmatic approach, and stylistic approach, etc. Based upon these researches, this thesis attempts to investigate into advertising language in light of the theory of cognitive linguistics on iconicity.Iconicity, as one of the attributes of language opposite to arbitrariness, has been one of the hot topics of cognitive linguistics in the past two decades. Iconicity refers to the iconic relation between linguistic form and the meaning it conveys. It is not only pervasive in ordinary language, but also in literature and all kinds of verbal discourse, including advertising. The difference of iconicity employed in ordinary language and in verbal arts is that in ordinary language iconicity is employed unconsciously, while in verbal arts it is employed as a rhetorical means purposefully, that is to say, in literature and verbal discourse, iconicity is taken as one of the rhetorical devices. Iconicity, as a rhetorical means, manifests itself at several dimensions of advertising language: phonology, graphology, syntactic structure and text.According to Peirce's trichotomy of the sign, iconicity can be classified into three subtypes correspondingly: imagic iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity and metaphorical iconicity. Since metaphorical iconicity is more complex and involves more factors, here we shall restrict our study to imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity.On the imagic level, two types of iconicity are identified: phonological iconicity and graphological iconicity. Phonological iconicity, which refers to the...