Iconicity in Language

Presenters: Bodo Winter

BMRC1

This workshop meets for 9 session dates: July 7, 10, 14, 17, 21, 24, 28, 31, and August 4. This workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to current and past research on iconicity, the perceived resemblance between form and meaning in linguistic signals. Examples of expressions which exhibit iconicity include onomatopoeias, such as English “bang” and “beep”, or the American Sign Language sign for ‘tree’, which mimics the shape of a tree. For much of the history of linguistics, iconicity has been thought to be a fringe topic, relegated to the margins of language. In this workshop, you will learn that contrary to this view, new research from the last couple decades shows that iconicity plays a role across different levels of linguistic analysis (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax) in both spoken and signed languages. We will review many different phenomena that exhibit iconicity, including manual gesture, prosody, phonesthemes, ideophones, writing systems, and more. And we will discuss empirical studies demonstrating that iconicity helps jumpstart new communication systems, including in language learning and language evolution. Throughout all of this, we will learn how iconicity interacts with processes of conventionalization, and how this over time can erode iconicity. Against the backdrop of all this research, we will revisit and critically reflect some of the foundational tenets of linguistics, such as the principle of arbitrariness, according to which words are lacking in form-meaning connection.

Keywords: Language Evolution, Written Language, Phonology, Lexicon

Presenters

Bodo Winter

University of Birmingham

Bodo Winter is a Professor at the Department of Language & Communication at the University of Birmingham and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. He has received his PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced, and authored the statistics textbook "Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R". His research combines experimental and corpus techniques to study multimodality, iconicity, gesture, and numerical communication.