A Study Of Rhetorical Iconicity In English Oratorical Discourse

As a persuasive activity, oratorical discourse can be traced back to the parliament debate of the Roman Empire. It is a form of communication in which people use voiced discourse to express their ideas and convey messages to their audience. Targeted at the large audience, oratorical discourses are usually addressed to express the orator's ideas, aiming to persuade, change and promote the audience's thoughts and behaviors. People often resort to oratorical discourse for improving every aspect of the society. Since it is an art of language, the language of oratorical discourse directly influences its effect. Therefore, with the aim of persuasion, the language of oratorical discourses should be made to be of some artistic quality. Many scholars have made great contributions to the research of oratorical language from the perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, stylistics, and what not. Based upon those researches, this thesis attempts to investigate into oratorical discourses in light of the theory of cognitive linguistics on iconicity.Iconicity, as one of the attributes of language opposite to arbitrariness, has been a recurring theme in linguistic inquiry into the nature of the linguistic sign. Iconicity refers to the correspondence between a linguistic form and the meaning it conveys. It is pervasive not only in ordinary language, but also in literature. The difference between iconicity employed in ordinary language and that in literature is as follows: In ordinary language iconicity is employed unconsciously, while in literature it is purposefully employed as a rhetorical means, i.e., iconicity is taken as one of the rhetorical devices. Iconicity, as a rhetorical means, manifests itself at several aspects of oratorical language: phonology, morphology, syntactic structure and text.According to Peirce's trichotomy of the sign, iconicity can be classified into...