Pragmatic Analysis Of Iconicity

Iconicity refers to the resemblance between linguistic structures and conceptual or experiential structures. It has been a popular topic for cognitive researches in recent decades. Iconicity researches place primary emphasis on the interpretability and motivations of linguistic signs, which constitute a great challenge as well as a good complement to Saussure's classic theory of arbitrariness. Exploration of linguistic iconicity is significant in enhancing people's understanding of the essence of language as well as human own cognitive states and features.This thesis attempts to apply some pragmatic theories to the analysis of the phenomenon of linguistic iconicity, hoping to establish some correspondences between linguistic structures and conceptual structures. Four commonly seen iconicity phenomena, namely, quantity iconicity, sequencing iconicity, markedness iconicity and distance iconicity, are interpreted within the framework of pragmatic theories constituted by politeness principle, conversational implicature theory, indirect speech act theory and relevance theory. It is found that the linguistic choice of quantity, sequencing, markedness and distance iconicity is based much on the pragmatic considerations of politeness, indirectness, degree of relevance, richness of implicature, mental and realistic distances, physical and cognitive sequences of events and so on. Concretely, quantity iconicity reflects the iconic relationship between the quantity of words on one side and the degree of politeness, the richness of conversational implicature and social distance on the other. Sequencing iconicity reflects the iconic relationship between the linear sequence of words and temporal, spatial, cognitive and cause-effect sequences. Markedness iconicity partly echoes the iconic relationship between the markedness of words and extra implicature, the fluctuations of processing effort and contextual effect, degree of relevance as well as the indirectness of speech act. Distance iconicity is a reflection of the iconic relationship between choice of distal or proximal deixis and social-psychological distance, between linguistic distance and conceptual distance.