Chapter published in:
Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems
Edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg and Elżbieta Tabakowska
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 18] 2022
► pp. 103–134

Chiastic iconicity

Refiguring symmetry

| University of Waterloo

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’.

Keywords: antimetabole, chiasmus, construction grammar, figural collocation, image schemes, rhetorical schemes, symmetry
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chiastic diagrammatization
  • 3.Chiastic ‘symmetry’
  • 4.‘Chiastic’ symmetry
  • 5.‘Chiastic’ meaning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Glossary of rhetorical figures mentioned in the chapter
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.18.06har
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