The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language

The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language offers a comprehensive guide to the role that iconicity - resemblance between form and meaning - plays in all modes of languages, on all levels of language, and in all aspects of language. The originally semiotic notion of iconicity has gained widespread attention beyond the field of linguistics; this volume thus brings together research exploring a wide range of topics in iconicity from different perspectives. It explores the history of iconicity and its place in linguistic theory, in particular how the idea of iconicity has developed over time and how it has recently begun to once again influence thinking and theorizing about language. By presenting a very broad spectrum of iconicity, the chapters provide greater recognition of its influence and present a clearer picture of its scope across the languages of the world. They also offer a critical discussion of the notion of iconicity, as its parameters, dimensions, and operationalizations are not always easy to define. The volume will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions, but also to a wider audience outside linguistics proper, including researchers and students in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

1 - Introduction: Iconicity as a general principle underlying language and language behavior
2 - Iconicity in classical philosophy: A legacy of prehistoric orality
3 - Peirce on icons and iconicity
4 - Saussure and iconicity: The ghost in the machine?
5 - nalogy and iconicity
6 - Iconicity in language typology
7 - The explanatory power of iconicity in language
8 - Frequency, variation, and iconicity
9 - Iconicity and generative grammar
10 - Iconicity in cognitive and functional linguistics
11 - Defining iconicity for the cognitive sciences
12 - Embodied mind
13 - Iconic prosody and its connection to iconic gesture
14 - Experimental approaches to sound symbolism
15 - Cross-linguistic vocal iconicity
16 - The segmentals and suprasegmentals of ideophones
17 - Iconicity in formational properties of signs in sign languages
18 - Phonographic writing systems
19 - Logographic writing systems and Chinese characters
20 - Notational iconicity
21 - Iconicity in word formation
22 - Reduplication in spoken and signed language
23 - Iconicity in diminutives and augmentatives
24 - Iconic plurality across modalities
25 - Iconicity in verbal formation
26 - Principles of diagrammatic iconicity in language
27 - The iconicity of affix order
28 - Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages
29 - The enactive iconicity of ideophone semantics
30 - Etymology and folk etymology
31 - Degrees of iconicity in gestures: From richness to schematicity
32 - Iconicity in the visual lexicons of comics
33 - Iconic sequencing in spoken and signed language
34 - Iconic and non-iconic aspects of storytelling: Narrative fiction, temporality, and memory
35 - Iconicity in signed narratives
36 - Iconic bootstrapping for language development: One size does not fit all
37 - Iconicity in L2 learning
38 - Iconicity in pidgins and creoles
39 - Effects of iconicity in populations with speech, language, and communication needs
40 - Iconicity in sign language processing: Lexical effects in comprehension and production
41 - A robustness approach to operationalizations of iconicity
42 - Iconicity in the mind: Unravelling the cognitive and neural pathways linking sound and meaning
43 - Sign iconicity and its contribution to gesture-first theories of language origin
44 - The evolution of linguistic iconicity and the cross-modal cognitive suite
45 - Iconicity, multi-modality, and language evolution
46 - De-iconization and (re)-iconization: Diachronic aspects of lexical iconicity in spoken languages
47 - De-iconization and re-iconization in signed languages: The case of Japanese sign language
48 - Iconicity in the evolution of language: Computational models and laboratory experiments
49 - Language contact and iconicity
50 - Iconicity in invented languages
51 - Iconicity in literature
52 - The aesthetic motivation of icons: 'We first love things when first we see them painted'
53 - Translation of iconicity: Iconicity of translation

Olga Fischer is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (OUP 2007), co-author of A Brief History of English Syntax (CUP 2017), founder and co-editor of the Iconicity in Language and Literature series (Benjamins 1999-present), and chief editor of Folia Linguistica (2016-2023). She has edited volumes on grammaticalization and syntactic change (Benjamins 2000, 2004), and has published widely in these areas in academic journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Diachronica, Transactions of the Philological Society, and Studies in Language. Kimi Akita is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Nagoya University. His research interests include ideophones, sound symbolism, and linguistic typology. He has published in major journals, including Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Journal of Linguistics. He is the co-editor of Iconicity: East Meets West (Benjamins 2015), The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition, and Translation (Routledge 2017), and Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives (Benjamins 2019). Pamela Perniss is Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting (DGS-German) program at the University of Cologne. Her research takes a multimodal approach to language and focuses in particular on the role of iconicity in the visual modality in shaping language structure and processing. She has co-edited volumes and special issues related to the study of iconicity, including in the series Iconicity in Language and Literature (Benjamins 2020) and in Language and Cognition (CUP 2020). She is General Editor of Sign Language & Linguistics and Associate Editor of Cognitive Science.