A Study Of English Complex Sentence Construction From The Perspective Of Iconicity

Complex sentence construction (CSC) is a basic sentence pattern of English.Owing to its special linguistic features, English CSC has attracted many scholars’interests and attention. They have made deep researches on it. The existing studies ofthem have made great contribution to the study of English CSC from fourperspectives. But because the points of penetration and study approaches of them aredifferent, none of these studies manages to give a comprehensive picture to theexplanation of English CSC.With the study of linguistics carrying out in a deep-going way, linguists havefound that language is not entirely arbitrary. There exists a natural relationshipbetween language structure and human beings’ experiential structure. Iconicity is animportant theory of cognitive linguistics, it has great significance in revealing themapping relationship between cognitive structure and human language structure.Based on the theory of iconicity, this thesis tries to provide an even morecomprehensive perspective for the investigation of English CSC.The construction of English complex sentence, i.e the way in which clauses areused together and arranged to form English complex sentence, is not arbitrary; instead,it is constrained by the cognitive law of human beings. This thesis attempts toresearch the constraints of cognitive law on English CSC from the perspective oficonicity. In order to find out the underlying cognitive motivations of English CSC,four principles of iconicity are used to the investigation of English CSC, they are theprinciple of sequence iconicity, the principle of quantity iconicity, the principle ofdistance iconicity, and the principle of perspective iconicity which is a new principleof iconicity proposed by us according to the definition of iconicity. This study findsout that the clause order of the main clause and the subordinate clause in Englishcomplex sentence corresponds to the sequence of the events or conceptions that themain clause and the subordinate clause expressed; the distance between the mainclause and the subordinate clause in English complex sentence corresponds to the conceptual distance of them; the complexity of the main clause and subordinate clausein English CSC corresponds to their conceptual complexity; the position of the mainclause or the sub-clause is related to the viewpoint, different viewpoint embodiesdifferent speaker’s perspective, reflects different perspective iconicity.All in all, this thesis seeks to answer this question: whether iconicity is theunderlying motivation of English CSC, i.e. whether the principles of iconicity are theconstraining factors of the clause order of the main clause and subordinate clause inEnglish complex sentence. With this question being answered, this thesis devotes toprove that iconicity can provide a more reasonable and comprehensive explanation toEnglish CSC.