An Iconic Study Of English Poems

This paper approaches the linguistic dispute over the nature of linguistic signs from a cognitive perspective. After talking about the relationship between arbitrariness and iconicity of linguistic signs, the author discusses the main principles of iconicity and attempts to make an iconic study of some English poems.The present paper consists of four chapters apart from introduction and conclusion. In the first chapter, the author makes a brief review of researches on English poems both at home and abroad from the following two perspectives: literary perspectives in terms of psychology, imagism, feminism and postmodernism; and linguistic perspectives in terms of structuralism, metaphor, iconicity, counterfactual spaces, etc. And at the end of each review, the author also points out the limitations of the previous studies. Chapter Two introduces the rationale of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce's trichotomous theory of signs and the methodology upon which the present paper is conducted. Chapter Three, which brings forth new ideas, is the most important and difficult part in this paper. Here the author proposes three major categories of iconicity: phonological iconicity, prominent iconicity and thematic iconicity, each containing its own subcategories. Then the author applies each principle of iconicity to the explanation and analysis of English poems. Chapter Four discusses theoretical and practical implications of the present research.To sum up, this paper makes a thorough and systematic study of English poems in terms of iconicity from the cognitive perspective. It explains and analyzes poems from a new angle of view in terms of form, structure and cognitive perspective, which adds a new theoretical researching field to the study of poetry. And this paper aims at a positive function of promoting poems appreciation and improving poems teaching.