The Characteristic Of Paradox Language In Modern Poetry

Paradox is a term first originated from logistics and subsequently developed during its application in philosophy, literature, linguistics and other disciplines. In the1940s, Cleanth Brooks, an American literary critic, for the first time introduced paradox into the research of poetic theory and regarded it as the essence of poetic language. This notion had a tremendous impact on the development of Chinese modern poetry, especially Chinese neo-poetry which flourished in the1970s and1980s. For a long time modern poetry was debated without the absence of paradoxical language, however, most of studies on paradoxical language of poetry were restricted in the scope of literary theory. In this essay, from the perspective of linguistics, an attempt was tried to demonstrate that paradoxical language is a significant language strategy used in modern poetry. With respect to the differences and association between the two strategies of paradox and irony, after a series of comparison and analyses, it was concluded that generalized paradox and irony belong to the same concept. To better understand paradoxical language of poetry from the aspect of linguistics, the writer investigated the characteristics of different types of paradoxical language in modern poetry by virtue of basic concepts of semantics and pragmatics. Although semantics and pragmatics both study the meaning of language, in the research on poetic language, semantics places emphasis on the relationship among words, phrases and sentences, while pragmatics focuses on the whole text of poetry and the relevant texts about social and cultural issues, indicative of the influence and restriction on works caused by poetic context.Based on the two angles above, efforts were devoted to attempts to explore characteristics of semantics-typed and pragmatics-typed paradoxical language in modern poetry. Additionally, from the standpoint of rhetoric, a variety of figures of speech could make poetic text have paradoxical effects. In the present paper, the corresponding figures of speech used in modern poetry were enumerated and discussed about the resulting significance of rhetoric.