A Study Of Iconicity And Its Rhetorical Function Through Advertising English

Iconicity theory, ranking as one of the important theories in cognitive linguistics, has been under hot discussion at home and abroad. With great efforts, linguists have described a great amount of iconic phenomena in language, generalized many iconicity principles and fully developed the theoretical system of iconicity. In recent years, some people have set out to explore iconicity and its rhetorical function, but most of their work is confined to stylistic analysis and literature appreciation, especially to the study of poetry. But advertising discourse, which is closely related to our life and full of vitality, is slightly touched. Therefore, this thesis intends to study iconicity and its rhetorical function in the untouched field of advertising English. It will be of great significance to widen the scope of rhetoric study of iconicity.Andreas Fischer should be regarded as the forerunner who has studied graphological iconicity in printed advertisements. But only the study of graphological iconicity is far from enough for us to thoroughly study iconicity and its rhetorical function in advertising English. Due to the special function and unique characteristics of advertisements, these elements of language such as sound, writing and meaning have to be taken into consideration to design a successful advertisement. Hence, there should be other types of iconicity working in advertisements in addition to graphological iconicity. From the angles of iconicity principles of sound, graphology, quantity and symmetry, this thesis explores the characteristics and rhetorical functions of iconicity through advertising English, which will verify that, in advertising English, iconicity is not only a natural language attribute opposite to arbitrariness but also an important rhetorical device.In addition, the earlier studies of iconicity mainly centered on the...