Abstract: Ariel has produced an accessibility hierarchy of English referring expressions,which,according to our analysis,can be illustrated in terms of iconic quantity on two analytical levels.With a contrastive analysis of the three principles in accessibility coding and iconic quantity,it is found that iconic quantity principle may well replace two out of the three accessibility coding principles,i.e.informativity and attenuation.In so doing,accessibility theory and iconicity theory are conjoined,in the meanwhile the relationship between informativity and attenuation is further highlighted.