Iconicity In Word Forms And Word Meanings Of Chinese And English Languages-a Contrastive Study

Concerning with the character of human language, there are two different opinions stood by Platonic paradigm and Aristotelian paradigm respectively.According to Platonic paradigm, language and reality must resemble each other to some extent if we want to be able to speak of reality without necessarily recurring to it directly. (Raffaele Simonel994) While Aristotelian (or better the Aristotelian-Saussurean) paradigm claims that language and reality are quite independent of, and do not resemble each other.Human language in a way projects the human thinking modes and presents reality internalized by human mind. This characteristic of natural language has been observed since a long time ago. Greek philosopher Plato records in his Cratylus the two opposite opinions on this subject. One opinion insists that between names of things and things themselves there exists a natural relation. That is, names of things imitate the nature of these things. While the other opinion refutes that the relation between names and things are completely arranged by human, i.e., this relation is thoroughly conventional rather than iconic. This is so-called the problem of Cratylus.Motivated by the above debate, this thesis intends to make a contrast between Chinese and English concerning iconicity of word forms and word meanings.This thesis consists of five parts. Part one is an introduction of the subject of this thesis, in which some basic ideas of semiotics are listed. And contentions concerning character of human language (arbitrary or iconic) are mentioned. Part two is a literature review of language iconicity. In this part, studies on language iconicity are reviewed briefly. Part three is theory perspectives. Four theories are introduced in this part, of which Peirce's semiotic theory and Sebeok's modeling system theory are mainly referred to in the discussions of the thesis. Part four is the main body of this thesis. This part focuses on the iconicity of word forms and word meanings of Chinese and English languages.The iconicity of Chinese characters is firstly attended to from the angle of Liu Shu (six categories of Chinese character), the ways of Chinese character coining. Then the iconicity of Chinese characters is looked into in details from four aspects: strokes, radicals, monomorphemic characters, and multimorphemic characters. Some pictures of the characters and the different forms of the characters in different periods of Chinese history are presented for the convenience of observation and comprehension of the iconicity of Chinese characters. The iconicity of English words is not as obvious as that of Chinese characters, of which, the iconicity of alphabetic letters is firstly investigated. Then, iconicity of some combinations of letters is discussed, and the corpus mainly comes from English anthologies of language iconicity. English is phonetic language, which means the investigation of iconicity of English words has to refer to phonaesthesia, kinaesthesia, even synaesthesia. These three aspects cover much of the discussion of iconicity of English words.Symbolic meanings are the focus in discussing the iconicity of word meanings of Chinese characters, since in discussing the iconicity of character forms, the literal meanings have been already unavoidably involved and mentioned. As to the iconicity of word meanings of English language, the mode mainly follows that of Sebeok, in which the derivative process of word meanings is traced and shown with diagrams.Part five is a conclusion of this thesis. Through presenting iconicity of word forms and word meanings of English and Chinese languages, this thesis aims to find the reasons for the differences concerning iconicity of word forms and word meanings between Chinese and English languages. As has been mentioned above, human language in a way projects the human thinking modes and presents reality internalized by human mind, and thus, this thesis ascribes the differences of language iconicity between the two languages to the different thinking modes of the two peoples, which is the final conclusion of this contrastive study.