Dimensions of Iconicity in the Visual Modality

ViCom Project Workshop
Location: University of Göttingen
Date: February 13-14, 2025



Description

A common assumption of different approaches to visible meaning is that iconicity is a general property of human languages in all modalities (spoken, written and signed), whereby sign languages seem to have or at least exploit a greater iconic potential than spoken languages (ignoring co-speech gestures, Perniss et al. 2010, Taub 2012). However, traditionally, iconicity has been considered to be an exception to the presumption of arbitrariness of form-meaning relations in natural languages. By contrast, more recent research on multimodal communication argues that iconicity does not only affect the form-meaning relation and the logical form in sign languages but also in spoken languages (e.g. ideophones and vocal gestures) and in (visual) gestures accompanying spoken languages, that is, iconicity has a high impact on linguistic form and meaning in all modalities. It has been shown that iconic components interact with and enter the semantic representation of (multimodal) linguistic utterances (Goldin-Meadow/Brentari 2017, Flaksman 2017, Schlenker 2018, Pendzich 2022, Steinbach 2023, Barnes/Ebert 2023).

Resent research on visual iconicity in both, the spoken and the signed modality, has investigated the phenomenon from very different perspectives, some of which will be discussed in this workshop. The workshop aims to cover the following main topics:

• The impact of iconicity on different levels of visual communication (lexical, grammatical, discourse functional; at-issue status of iconic enrichments).
  
• The iconic potential of different manual and nonmanual articulators.
  
• Iconic strategies used for the representation of different kinds of concepts.
  
• Metaphorical extensions of iconic expressions.
  
• Formal semantic and pragmatic analyses of iconic meaning contribution.
  
• Theoretical analyses of iconicity in cognitive linguistics and semiotics.
  
• Iconic form-meaning mismatches and the function of iconicity in lying and deceiving.
  
• The implementation of iconicity in sign language corpora and multimodal spoken language corpora.
  
• The function of iconicity in lexicalization, stabilization and grammaticalization processes.
  
• The role of iconicity in language processing, in first and second language and gesture acquisition and in in sign language teaching and interpreter training.