Iconicity In Modern Chinese And Its Rhetorical Effects

Iconicity theory, ranking as one of the important theories in cognitive linguistics, has been under hot discussion at home and abroad. With great efforts, linguists have described a great amount of iconic phenomena in language, generalized many iconicity principles and fully developed the theoretical system of iconicity. Many Chinese scholars have made some iconicity researches on modern Chinese, mainly on sound iconicity, sequencing iconicity, distance iconicity. It is proved that the Chinese language is an iconic language to great extent through studies. However, their researches are mostly from the grammatical angle and confined to vocabulary or syntax. And at the same time, this thesis has given a review of graphological iconicity, quantity iconicity and symmetrical iconicity researches in China, for there are hardly researches on these three iconicity principles in modern Chinese. Therefore, this thesis is an attempt to study iconicity on modern Chinese from a rhetorical approach, that is, this thesis intends to study iconicity and its rhetorical effects in the untouched field of modern Chinese. It will be of great significance to widen the scope of rhetoric study of iconicity.This thesis, from the angles of iconicity principles of sound, graphology, sequencing, distance, quantity and symmetry, explores the features and rhetorical effects of iconicity through modern Chinese, which will verify that, in modern Chinese, iconicity is an important rhetorical device.In addition, the earlier studies of iconicity mainly centered on the word and sentence levels. Recently, a small number of linguists have put forward text iconicity theory, which states that iconicity also exists at the text level. Based on this point, this study of iconicity and its rhetorical effects will be carried out at three levels of word, sentence and text. It will be of great significance to enrich the study of text iconicity.This thesis, on the one hand, promotes the study of rhetorical iconicity,on the other hand, it provides us with an iconic theoretical basis to study modern Chinese and rhetoric.