A Study Of Meaning Construction Of Visual Poetry Based On PMI Framework Mainland

With the development of linguistics and literature, the interface study betweenthe both, that is to apply linguistic theories to analyze some literary works, isbecoming a tendency gradually. Visual poetry, in terms of its particularcharacteristics, attracts many linguists’ attention for research.Previous studies on visual poetry can be summarized from five perspectives:literature, stylistics, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and multimodaldiscourse analysis, which enrich the studies on visual poetry. However, the studiesfrom literature, stylistics and functional linguistics focus on the superficial aspects ofvisual poetry, ignoring the internal construction of poetic meaning. Thesingle-perspective problem still exists in the study from cognitive linguistics.Although Hiraga puts forward a metaphor-icon model to analyze the meaninggeneration of visual poetry, there still exist some inadequacies in this model. For thisreason, this thesis attempts to set up a new framework to explain the meaningconstruction of visual poetry, aiming to make up the limitations of previous studies tosome extent.Based on the Poetic Metaphor (PM for short) proposed by Lakoff and Turnerand the Metaphorical Iconicity (MI for short) in terms of Peirce’s semiotics, thisthesis proposes a new analytical framework Poetic Metaphorical Iconicity (PMI forshort) in order to analyze the meaning construction of visual poetry. Through theanalysis of the process of meaning generation in some visual poetry within the PMIframework, the thesis finds out that the real meaning or motif poets intend to expresscan be explicated with the help of Poetic Metaphor, and such comprehensive andconcrete explanation will give the iconic meaning to poetic form so that theyresemble the real meaning or motif. In this way, the poetic meaning and forms areintegrated as a whole; moreover, the poetic meaning obtains a distilling through suchiconicity. In this sense, the PMI framework is reasonable and feasible, for PM has a general explanatory power to explain the metaphorical expressions with novelty andMI has a responsibility on the resemblance between the poetic forms and poeticmeaning, which are taken as two operating principles in the framework.The thesis has three major contributions: firstly, it establishes a new analyticalframework Poetic Metaphorical Iconicity (PMI for short on the basis of PoeticMetaphor (PM) and Metaphorical iconicity (MI) to account for the meaningconstruction of visual poetry. Secondly, it tries to make a thorough and systematicstudy to visual poetry, which summarizes its classification, i.e. the pattern poetry andthe concrete poetry, and explains each type with some examples. Finally, it appliessome linguistic theories to analyze visual poetry, a kind of literature, which can makea little contribution to the interface study between linguistics and literature.