What is iconicity and what makes it a significant part of linguistics

Iconicity refers to the degree to which a symbol or representation resembles the object or concept it signifies. In other words, it's the extent to which the form of a symbol reflects its meaning. For example, a drawing of a heart representing love is considered iconic because the shape of the heart resembles the organ associated with emotions and affection.

1. ICONICITY What is Iconicity? Icon means a sign in strict sense of the word. “ The way in which grammatical organization mirrors experience is called iconicity .” The principle of iconicity challenges the monopoly of arbitrariness. Saussure’s principle of the ‘‘arbitrariness of the linguistic sign stated that there was nothing ‘‘X-like’’ about a word ‘‘X’’ in any given language. The form and meaning of a word were regarded as independent of each other. The notion of iconicity assumes that a number of linguistic structures reflect the world’s structure and not the brain’s . In general, there is iconicity if something in the form of a sign reflects something in the world (normally through a mental operation).

2. ICONICITY Symbol, Index and Icon? “A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object .’’ ‘‘An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object ’’. There is a kind of causal relationship between the index and the object ; for example, smoke is an index of fire. ‘‘ An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own , and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not’’.

3. ICONICITY Kinds of Icons: “The image is the prototype of an icon. It is a simple sign that resembles its referent by virtue of sensory characteristics. These may be visual.’’ ‘‘A metaphor, in Peirce’s view, brings out the representative character of a sign by representing a parallelism in something else .” ‘‘ An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own , and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not’’.

4. ICONICITY Iconicity on the Phonic Level: “On the phonic level, we primarily find imagic iconicity, which is well known as onomatopoeia .” E.g crack, squeak, hiss, hush. cock-a-doodle-doo (English), kukeleku (Dutch), kikeriki (German), cocorico (French ), kukareku (Russian) Moreover , diagrammatic iconicity is rather limited on the phonic level because it is hard to assign meanings to sounds as such.

5. ICONICITY Diagrammatic Iconicity on the Morphological Level: “On the morphological level, we find iconicity to various degrees in the inflectional endings of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and, further, in the markedness relation between ‘positive’ and ‘negative ’. Iconicity has mostly to do with markedness . This concept is often captured in the slogan ‘‘The more form, the more meaning .’’ The more (marked) complex the form of a sign (or of a constellation of signs), the more ( marked) complex the meaning will be . Book book-s, girl girl-s As a human being, the speaker has certain biological, psychological ( perceptual), and cultural properties that can be called prototypical . These prototypical properties are reflected in language as unmarked semantic categories and tend to be acquired first by children . Examples include positive-negative, Agent-Patient , topic-comment , and subject-object.

6. ICONICITY Diagrammatic Iconicity on the Morphological Level: it is natural that ‘positive’ will be semantically unmarked with respect to ‘negative’. It is raining versus It is not raining ; happy vs un-happy. animate vs. in-animate, honest vs. dis-honest, entangle vs. dis-entangle, sense vs. non-sense. From an experiential perspective , the singular is semantically unmarked since the prototypical speaker is a single person, not a chorus. Also, it is easier to perceive or, more generally, to deal with one object at a time than with several. Book book-s, girl girl-s The feature ‘definite’ appears to be unmarked with respect to ‘indefinite’. Prototypical speakers are ‘‘definite’’ in the sense that they are presupposed to exist and to be unique (e.g., John, Mary , Paris ; I, you, he, she, it ). Since the prototypical speaker is human by definition, the feature ‘human’ will be unmarked vis -a`- vis ‘nonhuman ’. Human-animal-s

7. ICONICITY Diagrammatic Iconicity on the Morphological Level: Finally, with regard to gender, it is found that in most cultures the prototypical speaker is a man, not a woman, count vs. count- ess , prince vs. princ-ess . The present tense is semantically unmarked with respect to the past e.g. talk-talk- ed , talked, I work - I work-ed. Looking at adjectives, we typically find iconicity in the expression of the degrees of comparison. the comparative is more marked than the positive degree and often the superlative is more marked than the comparative , e.g. tall<tall- er <tall-est. the first adjective in such pairs as big—small, tall—short , long—short, thick—thin, high—low can be explained in the same way, an expected and even desirable property of the prototypical speaker and of nature in general seems to be to grow and expand, not to shrink.

8. ICONICITY Iconicity of Distance (or Closeness) in Syntactic Patterns: ‘‘The distance between expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between the ideas they represent .’’ Conjunction reduction a . We can do it quickly and well . (single circumstance) b. We can do it quickly and we can do it well . (two sets of conditions) Verbs of perceptions: a. I hear him sing; b) I hear that he sings In the that-clause, we have two propositions that can differ in terms of tense and modality Causative construction : a. I killed the chicken . b . I caused the chicken to die. Direct causation implies a unity of action, volition, place, and time: the event is one Gestalt. CLOSENESS IS STRENGTH METAPHOR (a) Sam killed Harry.///(b) Sam made Harry die.//(c) Sam caused Harry to die.//(d) Sam brought it about that Harry died.

9. ICONICITY Iconicity of Distance (or Closeness) in Syntactic Patterns: Distance iconicity affects the expression of certain grammatical relations. By definition, prepositional objects show a greater physical distance with the verb than direct objects . a. He smeared the wall with paint. b. He smeared paint on the wall . In the so-called holistic reading of ( a ), the whole wall is painted whereas this is normally not the case in (b ), where a ‘partial’ reading is most likely .

10. ICONICITY word-order iconicity: closeness in time word-order iconicity is found in the ordering of events in narrative sequences, which tends to reflect closeness in time. In a narrative sequence utterance 2 follows utterance 1, just like event 2 follows event 1 . a. She married and got pregnant . However, Subordinating conjunctions with a particular meaning may undo the iconic order , as in (a ), whereas others are subject to a fixed iconic order, as in (b ) and (c): a . She got pregnant after she married. b. He ran too hard so (that) he fell down. c. *So (that) he fell down he ran too hard.

11. ICONICITY word-order iconicity : closeness to the speaker. What is nearest to the speaker in a literal (physical) or in a metaphorical sense is mentioned first, especially again in asyndetic or in fixed coordinate structures . here and there, this and that, now and then, sooner or later. We also find metaphorical closeness to the prototypical speaker. happy or unhappy, yes or no, big and small, tall and short, a man or a mouse, husband and wife, this and something else . closeness in content : 1. the principle of head proximity the principle whereby a modifier is put as closely as possible to its head. One effect of this principle is the tendency for objects to accompany the verb they depend on or for adjectives to accompany the noun by which they are governed . Little girl, good person, three books, those people

12. ICONICITY word-order iconicity: Relative Adjacency. The modifiers that are closest to the head in content are generally placed closest to it as well. those three nice little white wooden dolls . Three dolls, nice dolls, white dolls, little dolls, wooden dolls We see that the qualifying adjectives appear closer to the noun than the quantifying modifiers. absolute objective qualities like wooden and white are closest to the noun, then objective qualities (size, e.g., little) are expressed farther away from the noun, and subjective qualities like nice and then the determiner

13. ICONICITY word-order iconicity: Relator in the Middle (RIM). An example of the typical ordering in coordination whereby a coordinator is placed between the elements it conjoins , as in John and Mary Coordinative and subordinative relators Coordinative relators include coordinating conjunctions , such as and subordinative relators are predicative and nonpredicative relators. Predicative relators are verbs and other predicates such as John loves Marry Nonpredicative relators include adpositions such as (preposition, post position, ambiposition , circumposition ) The girl (is) in the garden.

14. ICONICITY word-order iconicity: Relator in the Middle (RIM). word-order iconicity appears to be constituted by one general principle of closeness (or, alternatively , distance ), under which come various sub-principles . Three kinds of closeness have been reviewed: closeness of events in narrative sequence, closeness to the prototypical speaker or to the speakers as a physical entity, and finally, closeness in content .

15. ICONICITY Thank you