The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language
Abstract
Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which iconicity in face-to-face communication (spoken and signed) is a powerful vehicle for bridging between language and human sensori-motor experience, and, as such, iconicity provides a key to understanding language evolution, development and processing. In language evolution, iconicity might have played a key role in establishing displacement (the ability of language to refer beyond what is immediately present), which is core to what language does; in ontogenesis, iconicity might play a critical role in supporting referentiality (learning to map linguistic labels to objects, events, etc., in the world), which is core to vocabulary development. Finally, in language processing, iconicity could provide a mechanism to account for how language comes to be embodied (grounded in our sensory and motor systems), which is core to meaningful communication.
Cite this
Pamela Perniss, Gabriella Vigliocco (2014). The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0300
@article{pamela2014the,
title = {The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language},
author = {Perniss, Pamela and Vigliocco, Gabriella},
year = {2014},
journal = {Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences},
doi = {10.1098/rstb.2013.0300}
}Citations in this library
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