Research On The Rhetoric Of The Riddle Songs

For a long time, although Chinese character rhetoric in riddle songs has aroused attention of some scholars, of which phonetic rhetoric and vocabulary rhetoric are yet to discuss;despite the previous discussions on rhetorical devices, most of which are less commonly used ones, such as variation, isolation, continuation and so forth. This thesis elaborates on phonetic rhetoric、vocabulary rhetoric and factors of language rhetoric ways in the riddle songs, makes comparisons with other literary works and summarizes characteristics of non-Chinese character rhetoric in riddle songs in order to more in-depth understanding of the rhetoric features of riddle,Enriching the connotation of the Chinese rhetoric, so as to guide people better in employing language rhetoric.In this thesis, the main structure is divided into five parts:The introduction introduces the object, status, significance and methods of research and illustrate the data source.The first chapter distinguishes riddle songs from lantern riddles and poem riddles basically in terms of their differences and connections, in a bid to preventing confusing riddle songs with any other kind of riddles.The second chapter analyses the phonetic rhetoric in riddle songs, namely, rhyme and overlapping tone, compares them with those in other literary works, and concludes characteristics of phonetic rhetoric in riddle songs as follows: it is rather loose in selecting rhymes, rhyme patterns and emotional expressions while modern style poetry follows a vigorous system; it gives hints to solve riddles when there are reduplicated words in the riddle songs while words of this kind do not share the same function. This gives full play to the external form of riddle songs.The third chapter analyses the vocabulary rhetoric in riddle songs, describes the synonym and antonym in riddle songs, the synonym include language and verbal synonyms, and the antonym include antonyms which of the conceptual meaning of expressing have contradictory relations and boxing in two extremes of contrary relation in logic, and briefly compares them with those in other literary works.The forth chapter enumerates such rhetoric ways in riddle songs as metaphor, loopback, personification, references, compares the usage in other literary works and thereby summarizes characteristics of rhetoric ways in riddle songs as follows: no matter which rhetorical way is employed in riddles songs, types of sources are not plentiful enough; the use of rhetorical ways increases difficulties of solving riddles songs, which accordingly heightens interests of riddles solvers. The latter characteristic is the most distinct one.The conclusion summarizes characteristics of phonetic rhetoric、vocabulary rhetoric and factors of language rhetoric ways in riddle songs, and connections with non-linguistic rhetoric in order to showcase the innovations in this thesis.