Iconicity as Multimodal, Polysemiotic, and Plurifunctional

Abstract

Investigations of iconicity in language, whereby interactants coordinate meaningful bodily actions to create resemblances, are prevalent across the human communication sciences. However, when it comes to analysing and comparing iconicity across different interactions (e.g., deaf, deafblind, hearing) and modes of communication (e.g., manual signs, speech, writing), it is not always clear we are looking at the same thing. For example, tokens of spoken ideophones and manual depicting actions may both be analysed as iconic forms. Yet spoken ideophones may signal depictive and descriptive qualities via speech, while manual actions may signal depictive, descriptive, and indexical qualities via the shape, movement, and placement of the hands in space. Furthermore, each may co-occur with other semiotics articulated with the face, hands, and body within composite utterances. The paradigm of iconicity as a single property is too broad and coarse for comparative semiotics, as important details necessary for understanding the range of human communicative potentialities may be masked. Here, we draw on semiotic approaches to language and communication, including the model of language as signalled via describing, indicating and/or depicting and the notion of non-referential indexicality, to illustrate the multidimensionality of iconicity in co-present interactions. This builds on our earlier proposal for analysing how different methods of semiotic signalling are combined in multimodal language use. We discuss some implications for the language and communication sciences and explain how this approach may inform a theory of biosemiotics.

The evolution of linguistic iconicity and the cross-modal cognitive suite

“…Second, a focus on linguistic cross-modal correspondences underscores their considerable potential to account not only for grounding in spoken languages, but also signed languages which occur primarily in the manual/visual channel. Overall, the term linguistic cross-modal correspondence better fits the "multimodal, polysemiotic, and plurifunctional" nature of iconicity (Hodge and Ferrara, 2022).…”

“…This entails the fact that iconicity can be, but isn't necessarily, transparent in that it has an obvious meaning for a completely naïve onlooker or hearer. Form-meaning pairings can be iconic for some particular language users while being opaque or arbitrary to others (Occhino et al, 2017); forms can have a variety of guises, occurring in just one modality at a time (e.g., as a sound), or as a multimodal unit (e.g., a sound temporally synchronized with gesture and touch; Hodge and Ferrara, 2022).…”

The anatomy of iconicity: cumulative structural analogies underlie objective and subjective measures of iconicity

“…We can expect all 'iconic' signs in natural languages to have such non-alignable or arbitrary aspects. 1 It follows that signs can differ in the degree of iconicity they exhibit, but few if any signs can be said to be exclusively iconic (Capirci et al, 2022;Hodge & Ferrara, 2022).…”

“…The recent growth in lexical databases for signed languages makes it possible to do cross-linguistic work on signed language lexicons (e.g., Börstell et al, 2016). The methods described here open the way to explore modality-agnostic forms of iconicity in ways that are sensitive to the attested semiotic diversity of languages (Hodge & Ferrara, 2022).…”

Two measures are better than one: combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

“…In collecting these different measures, we made some variations particularly to the design of the guessing experiments to fine-tune the sensitivity of this task to detecting form-meaning resemblances specifically. While individual measures can be fine-tuned in this way to focus on specific factors, our experience of iconicity in the real world is multidimensional (e.g., Hodge & Ferrara, 2022), and for this reason, we believe that moving forward triangulating insights from multiple measures offers the greatest explanatory power when seeking to understand how iconicity affects various aspects of language. We illustrate this with the guessing and rating data by showing how when used together the two measures shed light on each other, and on the contribution of different factors to iconic effects.…”