Masako K. Hiraga

Diagrams and metaphors: Iconic aspects in language*

The problem of iconicity has been a recurring theme in linguistic inquiry into the nature of the linguistic sign. The property of iconicity includes not only the narrow category of sound symbolism, but also the broad categories of isomorphism and metaphor. This paper surveys recent research, and offers a classification of diagrammatic and metaphorical iconicity in language. Problems of structural diagram, relational diagram, grammatical metaphor, conventional metaphor and poetic metaphor are discussed, with a few illustrative examples. This review shows that an evaluation of the property of iconicity in language has implications for the general theory of language as a ‘natural’ phenomenon.

Metaphor and Iconicity

than imagic iconicity, and it is less prominent in the texts. Nevertheless, the sample analyses aim to demonstrate that both types of iconicity are intertwined with the metaphorical structuring of the text to evoke the intended meaning effectively. 5.2.1 The dance of sounds in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Bells’ ‘The Bells’ by Edgar Allan Poe (1919: 63–6) is known for its clever use of onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism. The following analysis will briefly demonstrate how and to what degree auditory iconicity is prevalent and crucial in the sound make-up of this poem. Example 5.1 THE BELLS I HEAR the sledges with the bells – 1 Silver bells! 2 What a world of merriment their melody foretells! 3 How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, 4 In the icy air of night! 5 While the stars that oversprinkle 6 All the Heavens, seem to twinkle 7 With a crystalline delight; 8 Keeping time, time, time, 9 In a sort of Runic rhyme, 10 To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells 11 From the bells, bells, bells, bells, 12 Bells, bells, bells – 13 From the jingling and tinkling of the bells. 14 II Hear the mellow wedding bells – 1 Golden bells! 2 What a world of happiness their harmony foretells 3 Through the balmy air of night 4 How they ring out their delight! – 5 From the molten-golden notes, 6 And all in tune, 7 What a liquid ditty floats 8 To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats 9 On the moon! 10 Sound as Meaning 135 1403_933456_06_cha05.qxd 11/10/2004 4:58 PM Page 135

Differing Perceptions of Face in British and Japanese Academic Settings

This paper looks at the presentation of and response to face threatening acts (FTA) in tutor-student interaction in British and Japanese academic contexts. The specific FTAs looked at were criticism, suggestion and request. Their location in a specific genre, i.e., the one-to-one tutorial, is an important determinant, both for their occurrence and for their interpretation. We investigated five recurring situations in the authentic data: three which were tutor-initiated with the illocutionary force of criticism, suggestion and request for clarification, and two which were student-initiated requests. These situations were incorporated into a discourse completion test, which was administered to native speakers of English and Japanese. The results revealed that while the British students primarily dealt with their own face wants, both positive and negative face wants, the Japanese students showed more concern for the positive face of the tutor. There was an obvious attendance to negative face in the British context, where both the tutor and the student attended each others negative face and the students attended their own, whereas there was an effacement of negative face in the Japanese context, where neither the tutors nor the students tended to attend each others or their own negative face. This study, therefore, moves ‘face’ out of the specific realm of politeness, and attempts to demonstrate its wider applicability in contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatics.

Researching Intercultural Communication in a UK Higher Education Context

In this chapter, we undertake four different kinds of analysis towards an understanding of intercultural communication in action. The action is situated in a context where intercultural encounters are common, namely contemporary higher education. Furthermore, the intercultural encounters are discipline specific. They take place in one-to-one tutorials in fine art, in a UK institution. The lecturers are British and the students are Japanese. In the first place, the tutorial interactions are analysed in terms of the tutorial as genre; second, certain recurring exchange types within the tutorial are isolated as examples of what we call epistemic principles, namely those underlying principles which motivate teaching and learning in the discipline. Third, and following on from the discourse analytic perspective of the students behaviour, students’ own accounts of why they were behaving as they were, and how they understood the tutorial interactions, are explored in a number of retrospective, semi-structured interviews. The stimulus for those interviews were video-recordings of the students tutorials, which had taken place one year earlier, and they were carried out in Japanese. This afforded a fourth kind of analysis, namely the extent to which the students had adapted to or resisted not only the interactional norms of the tutorial, that is behaving like students in a UK context, but also the disciplinary norms which lay behind those interactions.

Sound as Meaning

Sound as well as vision has a rich tradition in poetic analysis. It can constitute the form of a poem, offering shape and material. The quality inherent in sounds gives texture to a poem, whereas the pattern of sounds gives it architecture. Sound may not only be essential in terms of its formal qualities, but also important in terms of its intimate relationship with the meaning of a poem. The relationship between sound and meaning in poetry is an extremely close one. For example, Shapiro and Beum have said that usually a poet ‘creates a form that “says” the same thing as the words themselves say’ (1965: 2). This wedding of sound and sense — how sound contributes to complementing the whole experience of a poem — has been the focus of an enormous amount of endeavour in poetic research. Traditionally it has been studied in the field of prosody or metrics.

Vision as Meaning

As William Blake (1978 [1810]: 1019), the poet and visual artist, wrote, both in painting and in poetry, the visual form can represent the conscious intention of the artist. The writing system, as I am going to argue in this study, not only refers to the conventions which record semantic and phonological content, but also covers a wider range of semiotic representations. These include the use of different kinds of typeface, spacing, indentation and layout, and they all have visual, graphic and conceptual effects. This wider sense of the writing system plays a crucial role in the way a poem is put on the page. Not only does it provide resources for the visual shape and structure of the poem, it can also influence the interpretation of the poem.1