The Meaning Construction Of Visual Poetry From The Perspective Of Iconicity

Poetry,as a kind of literary genre,making the most of its pithy words,colorful feelings,and abundant images,highly reveals the social life and spiritual world of human beings.Traditionally,poetry has its certain form of syllables,tones and rhymes.Visual poetry,however,takes priority of its layout,so as to represent the meaning in a special way.In this way,it will be a happy surprise for readers when they enjoy themselves in the visual feast brought about by the temporal and spatial art of visual poetry.And its uniqueness and novelty is also favored and studied by scholars all over the world.This thesis explores the meaning construction of visual poetry from the perspective of iconicity.Specifically,it chooses several poems in Zhu Yingchun's The Designing Wordsmith to explore the possible correspondent relationship between language form and meaning.The previous semantic studies of visual poetry are mainly from the perspective of literature,multimodal discourse analysis,functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics,which are quite devoid of substance and far away from the nature.The thesis attempts to explore the feasibility of iconicity in the analysis of visual poetry,and explain the meaning construction of visual poetry based on the classification of iconicity.We found that there are deeper motivations lying in the iconicity displayed by visual poetry,namely linguistic reality,cognitive attribution,pragmatic effect and aesthetic significance.At the level of linguistic reality,the relative arbitrariness of language,and the ideogrammatic function and semantic density of Chinese character as a sort of pictograph facilitate the wording and layout of Chinese visual poetry.At the level of cognitive attribution,gestalt,metaphor and metonymy can give an effective explanation of the multimodual representation of visual poetry.At the level of pragmatic effect,the principle of least effort and relevance theory cast light upon the negative relation between the relevance of language form and meaning and the cognitive effort needed.At the level of aesthetic significance,the appropriate deployment of spatial design in visual poetry reflects its aesthetic value of being deep-going but explicit,and novel.Cooperatively,these four levels decode theiconicity-based meaning construction of visual poetry.