At the lexical level, the phonological form of a linguistic sign is considered to have no relationship to its meaning. Words, and more generally language as a symbolic system, are conceived of as being arbitrarily related to the world. In Plato’s Cratylus, the oldest documented of these debates, Socrates is asked to contemplate the question of whether names belong to their objects “naturally” or “conventionally.” The latter of these two possibilities, namely that form and meaning are linked by convention and tradition alone, has come to dominate our modern thinking about language. Early debates centered on the origin of words (as names for things), specifically, on the nature of their relation to the things they stand for. The relation between words and real-world referents has intrigued scholars since antiquity. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to “hook up” to motor, perceptual, and affective experience.Īrbitrariness in Language: The Received View Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings found in signed languages. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, UKĬurrent views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning.
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