A Study Of Iconicity In English Poetry

This thesis aims to apply iconicity theory and its principles to the understanding and appreciation of English poetry, trying to dig out the correlations between form and meaning in this special literary genre.Iconicity is not only encountered in natural language, but also in literary language, especially in poetry, which is said to have the richest presence of iconicity in all literary genres, because poetry allows the most complex and innovative use of language on the typographical level (such as special use of fonts and spacing), on the sound level (such as sound symbolism, metre and rhyme), on the morphological level, on the syntactic level (such as changes in regular word order and distancing), and on the discoursal level. Linguists and stylists have been studying English poetry from many perspectives such as voice and tone, sound and sense, rhyme and meter, diction and syntax, image and symbol, etc. This thesis attempts to analyze poetry from a more integrated and original perspective, an iconic perspective.The thesis achieves the following missions: First of all, many examples are cited and analyzed to prove that the theory of iconicity offers a new rhetorical perspective for the interpretation of English poetry by identifying the various levels of iconicity and their significance in poetic texts.Secondly, this thesis gives a deeper insight into the way language is handled by poets, and how poems can be better appreciated by readers or listeners in a dynamic, cognitive and emotive interaction.Thirdly, this essay provides a more comprehensive study of iconicity on all levels of poetry. Previous studies on this subject mainly focus on the diagrammatic iconicity on the syntactic or discoursal level based on Hiraga's classification of structural and relational iconicity. By examining the sound, typology and morphology of poetry, we can draw the conclusion that iconicity is a far more pervasive device in this unique literary form.The thesis equips readers with more awareness of the fact that the form of a poem contributes a lot to its meaning. And it further proves that iconicity is one of the basic features of language and an important means of people's perception and conception of the external and internal world.