The Iconicity Analysis On Indirect Speech Act

The notion of iconicity should be extended to the perceived similarity between the linguistic signs and its referents, between one sign and another, and between linguistic structure and conceptual structure. According to iconicity, the politeness can be reflected in indirect speech act, the language form is iconic to the conceptual structure. In this thesis, the author will employ distance iconicity, quantity iconicity and markedness iconicity to explain the politeness in indirect speech act.Indirect speech act is employed to avoid conflicts and show politeness. The distance iconicity shows that the distance exists between the meaning of an utterance and its actual form. The longer the distance it is, the polite the speaker. This principle tells indirect speech can reflect psychological distance and politeness motivation among interlocutors. With more unpredictable information, more linguistic units will be employed. The quantity iconicity tells the more complex the expression it is, the more polite it is, the less familiar or less predictable the content is. This principle can also explain why indirect speech act can show the politeness. It is characteristic that inconsistence exists between the discourse meaning and sentence meaning. Markedness shows inconsistence between the discourse meaning and sentence meaning means indirectness. The marked terms are always different from the conventional expression for considering the interpersonal relations and politeness. Thus indirect speech act is the marked term which is iconic the additional meaning, this additional meaning is motivated by politeness.Iconicity provides the new angle for studying the language. It tells that the language is not absolutely arbitrary. Beside indirect speech, many other human languages are iconic, iconicity is the common character of language. This thesis will mainly give politeness of iconicity of indirect speech act a new mechanism.