A Study On Iconicity In The English Translations Of The Scenery Lyric Poetry In The Tang Dynasty

Iconicity, namely motivation about the nature of language, is an important theory studiedand discussed by scholars in the fields of philosophy, semiotics and cognitive linguistics(Wang2007). Especially in cognitive linguistics, iconicity is endowed with a deeperimplication.Cognitive linguists Pierce (1940), Langacker (1990) and Wang Yin (2007) use iconicityto explain the mapping relationship between language form and human cognition, experience,concept; they also explain the iconic relationship between language form and meaning. Theythink language form in phonetics, morphological patterns and sentence structures has closerelationship with the objective world, experience, cognitive feature, conceptual structures andmeaning. This relationship is reasonable instead of being created arbitrarily (Zhao2001).Iconicity questions and challenges the traditional arbitrariness of language sign; it shakes theauthoritative status of arbitrariness represented by Saussure in linguistics. Besides, iconicityhas a vital effect on instructing theory as well as practice in the aspects of English vocabularyteaching, figures of speech, stylistic features, contrast between Chinese and English.This thesis takes typical scenery lyric poetry in the Tang Dynasty and its Englishtranslation as example, and uses the iconic principles, namely, imagic iconicity, diagrammaticiconicity and metaphorical iconicity proposed by Peirce to analyze and compare iconicity inthe scenery lyric poetry in the Tang Dynasty and its English translation. It tries to study theexplanatory power and influence of iconicity on English translation of the scenery lyric poetryin the Tang Dynasty, hoping to provide new perspectives and enlightenments for theappreciation and translation of Tang poetry.The analysis of examples proves that iconicity exists in the scenery lyric poetry in theTang Dynasty, and the language form in choices, sequences, combination of words in theEnglish translations has obvious iconic relationship with the meaning of the original poetry.Since English translation of Tang poetry refers to the transformation of two differentlanguages and cultures, it will be bound to cause derogation or salience of iconicity in theEnglish translations, which makes iconicity in the English translations deviate or approachthat in original poems. All of these will raise higher standard and requirement for theunderstanding and translation of Tang poetry.