THE ANALOGUE-BUILDING MODEL: IMAGE SELECTION, SCHEMATIZATION, AND ENCODING

The examples of Chapter Three have demonstrated that both signed and spoken languages have iconicity, and that iconicity manifests not only at the lexical level but also at morphological and syntactic levels. This is enough to show that form–meaning resemblance should be included on the list of phenomena that all reasonable linguistic theories explain. Other questions about iconicity immediately arise. How are iconic items created? How is the form–meaning resemblance modeled in users' minds? Are new iconic items created on-line? How does iconicity interact with other ways in which meaning motivates form? This chapter proposes answers to some of these questions.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general framework and a set of tools for precise description, modeling, and analysis of iconic linguistic items. As we shall see, this framework can be applied equally well to iconicity in either the spoken or signed modality and at any level of linguistic structure. The fact that iconicity is more common in the signed modality is a simple consequence of this framework as well.

To model iconicity fully, we need to talk both about structure-preserving mappings of meaning onto form and about creation of particular forms (“analogues”) that are amenable to such mappings. In most iconic items, we create an analogue of the referent's image out of the phonetic “stuff” of our language: sounds, movements, shapes. How exactly do we determine the form of that “stuff”?