Study Of Linguistic Signs In White Noise

As an American postmodernist writer,Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise deeply analyze the reality in postmodern society of America and presents the living conditions of the general public in his literary works.The novel has aroused scholars’ much concern as soon as it was published.And Critics are more interested in studying about him and begin to do researches on his works.Studies at home and aboard on White Noise usually can be divided into three aspects: studies on themes,on narratives and on language features.Morris thinks that semiotics includes three levels: syntactics,semantics and pragmatics.Syntactics studies the relationships among forms of signs;semantics discusses all kinds of denotations of signs,which focuses on discussing meanings of signs;pragmatics tends to do a research on the relationships between signs and interpreters.Based on Morris’ s semiotics theory,this thesis deeply investigates the meanings of linguistic signs in White Noise from the three levels of syntactics,semantics and pragmatics.And the transmission of these meanings has to be achieved by means of signs too.To be specific,the semiosis is a process of searching for meanings constantly where new signs can be produced in this process at the same time.This study attempts to discuss the deep connotation of the text from the three levels of syntactics,semantics and pragmatics mainly through qualitative analysis supplemented by quantitative analysis simultaneously.And the following conclusions are drawn:Firstly,in terms of syntactics,the novel White Noise takes the postmodern society of America as a creation background,which is filled with a variety of signs such as academic signs,culture signs,consumption signs,anchoring signs and etc.The values of signs for different objects have replaced their practical values,which makes the novel refer to signs themselves.Signs are in the forms of both chains and combinations,which make the disordered text become ordered.Meanwhile,the readers experience a refreshing feeling in the process of reading.Secondly,in terms of semantics,the theme “truth and fiction” in White Noise is reflected through a large number of signs.It’s easy to find that the historical truth and the literature fiction are combined together.By using anchoring signs including toponym,anthroponym and chrononym,the novel is anchored in a real sign system and creates a sense of reality.By applying a system of objective signs,the novel satisfies the inner security and psychological needs.The signified of signs is the illusion of prosperity in reality and affluence in economy.Even more,the application of numerous vague signs gradually makes the bound between the fiction and the truth fade away.The real events that happened in reality are adopted in the novel and supplemented by fictional elements,which generate new values at the colliding and blending of the fiction and truth.Thirdly,in White Noise,the particularity and fragmentation of language break the integrity of the novel in syntactics;the theme “fiction and truth” is reflected in semantics.Morris’ s semiotics theory provides a clear theoretical interpretation for the disorganized novel-White Noise,which converges on the characteristics above.In postmodernist fictions,signs are randomly inlaid in the text in order to make them disordered,which also confuse the reader’s judgment about the truth and fiction because of their permeability.And anyone who tries to explore the ultimate meanings of postmodernist fictions will end in failure because new signs and meanings are concurrently generated in the process of semiosis.Postmodernist fictions aim to raise readers’ reflections on the present social reality by interacting between the writers’ encoding and readers’ decoding.