Chiastic iconicity

Abstract

Chiastic structure (ABBA) leverages the iconicity principles of identity, sequential order, and quantity for consolidated iconicities of harmonious balance and cyclicity, effecting an aesthetic response that is very often but somewhat incongruously associated with mirror-image symmetry. The ABBA pattern does not effect this response alone, however. Chiastic figures collocate preferentially with other figures to achieve these effects, especially including figures of parallelism. These figural convergences, collocating additionally with certain grammatical features, raise the iconicity stakes somewhat further to enact a quite specific suite of meanings: comprehensiveness, irrelevance of order, reciprocal specification, and reciprocal energy. These claims are developed with particular attention to lexical chiasmus, the rhetorical scheme known as ‘antimetabole’.

Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiastic structure increases the subjective accuracy of statements.

“…For instance, Turner (1998), Fahnestock (2005), Oakley (2009, 2020), and Harris (2022a), among others, argue for a wider inclusion of rhetorical figures than the few tropes cognitive linguists incorporate, especially the category of figures known as schemes (more colloquially, “figures of speech”), like rhyme, alliteration, isocolon, and the one this study investigates, antimetabole. Schemes are formal figures: salient patterns of sounds, morphemes, words, and phrases.…”

“…To the extent they have any reputation at all in such quarters, however, rhetorical schemes are treated in linguistics, psychology, and other cognitive sciences, as “merely” esthetic flourishes, decorative little doodads found only in speciality discourses like poetry and oratory. But this ignores their ubiquity in everyday language (Hall, 2001), the distinctive communicative functions many figures serve (Fahnestock, 1999), and the close similarities the tradition of rhetorical figures has with the mandate of Construction Grammar (Harris, 2022a; Turner, 1998, 2018), namely, the pairing of form and meaning (Hoffmann & Trousdale, 2013).…”

“…The A-B-B-A pattern of antimetabole realizes the iconicity of quantity, because of its repeating words, as well as the principle known as “iconicity of sequence” because it juxtaposes two opposing sequences of words. The opposing sequences can reverse the flow of the predication or the importance of the terms, or both, depending on other linguistic factors, like syntactic structure and lexical category, and in combination with quantity create a sense of balance (Harris, 2022a).…”