Syntactic Iconicity And Its Rhetorical Function

Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, proposes that a language is a system of signs, and linguistic signs are arbitrary, that is, there is no logical relation between the signifier and the signified.Founder of American practicalism and semiotics, C.S Pierce identifies three categories of signs: icon, index and symbol. He focused on the natural relation between the signifier and the signified as iconicity. Further, Pierce divided icon into imagic icon and diagrammatic icon. Diagrammatic icon in language is mainly reflected in syntactic iconicity.Syntactic iconicity includes iconicity of quantity, iconicity of order, iconicity of distance and iconicity of markedness. Quantity iconicity means that linguistic complexity corresponds to the conceptual complexity or the degree of familiarity or predictability. Iconicity of order means that the order of linguistic form or text structure corresponds to the conceptual or experiential order it represents. Iconicity of distance means that a formal distance between elements corresponds to the conceptual distance between them. And the iconicity of markedness is that the order from unmarkedness to markedness corresponds to the natural order of cognition. The marked term corresponds to the additional meaning.Rhetoric, in a wide sense, is a process and an action in which the cognitive world of language users and their expressions become integrated with the participation of cognition, including the use of language and other linguistic signs, such as visual images and signs, for communication. Iconicity, in essence, can be seen as a rhetorical device.