Iconicity in Language and Literature

This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example, the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.

Against the background of jargon-ridden and often obscure semiotic literature Sadowski’s book offers a reader-friendly yet rigorous account of human communication and its evolution from animal and primate behaviour. What is specifically human about the way we exchange information with other people, and to what extent are our facial expressions, body language, and even emotive elements of speech still indebted to our pre-human ancestors? Why can the chimpanzees, smart as they are, not interpret animal tracks in the ground; why did religions often ban representational art; why is photography perceptually more powerful than painting; how have human syntactic speech and combinatorial grammar enabled the “explosion” of culture; and why do otherwise rational humans often strongly believe in the objective existence of unempirical, virtual entities such as religious and philosophic concepts? These and many other fascinating questions are addressed in the book within the methodological framework of systems theory and evolutionary psychology.

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.

This volume investigates iconicity as to both comprehension and production of meaning in language, gesture, pictures, art and literature. It highlights iconic processes in meaning-making and interpretation across different semiotic systems at structurally, historically and pragmatically different levels of iconicity, with special focus on Cognitive Semiotics. Exploring the ubiquity of iconicity in verbal, visual and gestural communication, these contributions discuss it from the point of view of human meaning-making, examined as a phenomenon that is experienced, embodied and often polysemiotic in nature.

Insistent Images presents a number of new departures dealing with iconicity on the conceptual and the structural levels. On the level of structure, the interface between different aspects of iconicity, lexical meaning and grammar is discussed in reference to both spoken and signed languages. Novel approaches to aural iconicity investigate a wide range of phenomena from phonological iconicity to the role of iconic features in discourse, in the nineteenth century practice of reading aloud, in the almost magic incantations of fin de siècle poetry and in Tolkien’s invented languages. Several papers examine the function of iconicity in visual and avant-garde poetry, where iconic features allow a reduction of means, which, paradoxically, generates textual diversification and complexity. A discussion of iconic text strategies shows how texts are comprehended through iconic holistic transfer from complex natural and action patterns. ‘Liberature’, which integrates text, image and physical space, is another novel area of study, as are the investigations into the iconic properties of film and of multimedia performance. Film is intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical; in multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization. These last two new fields of inquiry further enhance this truly interdisciplinary volume’s explorations of icons as ‘insistent images’.

This volume, a sequel to Form Miming Meaning (1999), offers a selection of papers given at the second international symposium on iconicity (Amsterdam 1999). In the light of semiotic, linguistic and literary theory the studies gathered here investigate how iconicity works on all levels of language, in literary texts and other forms of verbal discourse. They investigate, among other subjects, the semiotic foundations of iconicity, the role played by iconicity in language evolution and in the way words are positioned syntactically. Special consideration is given to the iconic nature of metaphor and the ‘mise en abyme’, to iconically motivated punctuation and other typographic matters such as the manipulation of colour, fonts and spacing in advertising and in poetry. Other studies show how iconicity influences Shakespeare’s rhetoric, the structural design of Margaret Atwood’s writings and the changing fashions in fictional landscape description. Thus, these analyses of ‘the motivated sign’ represent yet another strong challenge to “Saussure’s dogma of arbitrariness” (Jakobson).

The Iconicity in Language and Literature series has long been dedicated to the recognition and understanding of the pervasiveness of iconicity in language in its many forms and functions. The present volume, divided into four sections, brings together and unifies different perspectives on iconicity. Chapters in the first section (Iconicity in language) provide linguistic analyses of systems of iconic forms in different languages, across both space (areally) and time (diachronically). The second section (Iconicity in literature) is concerned with stylistic analyses of iconicity in literature, in both poetry and prose and across a range of devices and genres. The third section (Iconicity in visual media) highlights the use and effects of iconicity in pictorial, photographic and cinematic media. The final section (Iconicity in semiotic analysis) offers a theoretical perspective, targeting an operationalisation of iconicity with respect to the relationship between types and subtypes of Peircean signs.

The contributions to this volume focus on the interrelation between prosody and iconicity and shed new light on the topic by enlarging the number of parameters traditionally considered, and by confronting various theoretical backgrounds. The parameters taken into account include socio-linguistic criteria (age, sex, socio-economic category, region); different kinds of speech situation; affect (attitudes and emotions); gestures; morpho-syntactic constraints. The analysis is pursued in theoretical frameworks such as Information Structure theory, Grice's theory, Relevance theory, experiential blending, Gussenhoven's biological codes, prosodic modelling, automatic detection. The languages covered include English, French, Italian, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Majorcan Catalan. The book will be of great interest to linguists working on prosody.

The title of this volume strives to capture the dynamic scope and range of the essays it contains, applying insights into the workings of iconicity to texts as far removed from each other in time as the Medieval tale of a bishop-fish and the war-poems of 20^th century Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, and as thematically diverse as the Pilgrim’s Progress and the poetry of e.e. cummings. Applications reference both language and linguistics as well as literature and literary theory – and related fields such as sign language and translation; the former approached from the point of view of Japan Sign Language, the latter with reference to translations of the Koran and the Sesotho Bible, as well as modern German and English Bible translations. On the language side, the intricate relationships between sound symbolism and etymology, and between analogy and grammaticalization are examined in depth. On the literary side, the iconic effects of techniques such as enjambment and metrical inversion are considered, but also the ways in which an understanding of iconicity can open up meanings in complex poetry, like that of the Afrikaans poet T.T. Cloete – in this particular instance three poems inspired by figures as diverse as Dante, Paul Klee and the pop icon Marilyn Monroe. In view of the fact that form is able to mime meaning and meaning itself can be mimed by meaning, the theoretical question is asked – on the basis of a wide range of examples from literature, language, music and other sign-systems – whether meaning can also mime form. An introduction to the work of H.C.T. Müller, an early scholar in the field of iconicity, highlights a regrettably little known South African contribution to the development of iconicity theory.