From: rcj@engin.umich.edu (R o d Johnson)
Subject: Re: Iconicity
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 92 03:05:04 EDT
Organization: Lost Tribes of Gazebo

Bert Peeters asks about iconicity.  The notion is originally from
Charles Saunders Peirce.  It's difficult to do justice to his idea in
a short summary because it's so bound up with his theory of signs, his
various (and ever-changing) typologies of them, and the basic
categories of his metaphysics ("Firstness", "Secondness" and
"Thirdness").  A fairly fuzzy version would say that an icon is a sign
that stands for an object by virtue of its resemblance to the object
(as opposed to two other types, indices and symbols).

This concept has been used and abused in various ways.  Since Peirce's
writings were hard to find and hard to interpret for many years, most
people were introduced to many of his main ideas by Charles Morris;
unfortunately, Morris was hell-bent on reading Peirce in a way that
fit behaviorist dogma, and was insensitive to the many aspects of
Peirce's thought that weren't well suited to this.  This situation has
gotten much better as Peirce scholarship has improved in recent years.
Now all his important works are readily available (as "Collected
Papers of C. S. Peirce").  They're still extremely complex, however,
and some secondary sources are better places to start.  In particular,
for linguists, I'd recommend the following:

Roman Jakobson, "Quest for the Essence of Language." (In J's Selected
Writings) This is the paper that really introduced iconicity into
linguistics.  A really remarkable compendium of phenomena that
inspired a lot of subsequent work, much of it not very good, alas, due
to a rather loose understanding of the basic idea.

Umberto Eco, "A Theory of Semiotics".  Useful for its excellent
summary of Peirce and his criticism of the idea.

Michael Shapiro, "The Sense of Grammar."  A detailed exposition of
Peircean theory and the many Peircean typologies of signs, with much
linguistic exemplification.  The best overview of Peirce for linguists
I have seen.

Two papers by John Haiman, "The Iconicity of Grammar: Isomorphism and
Motivation" (Language 54:565-89) and "Iconic and Economic Motivation"
(Language 59:781-519), and his book "Natural Syntax".

Rick Morneau suggests

>    Haiman, John (Ed). Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam: John
>      Benjamins, 1985.
 
I'd recommend *not* reading this until you have a good grasp of the
Peircean context, since many of the articles have a really tenuous
grasp of what iconicity means, and as a result it gets diluted to near
meaninglessness.  This is a real problem with much "functional syntax"
work, which tends to invoke iconicty as a sort of vague
pseudo-explanatory principle without really doing the hard theoretical
work (I'll exempt Haiman and a few others from this criticism).  The
idea of iconicity really is meaningless unless it's founded on a 
theory of signs (however this is understood) and their objects; in the
absence of such a theory it usually turns out to be some intuition
that the way language represents things is somehow like the things
themselves--not a very useful idea in its naive form, yet one that
several of Haiman's contributors seem to feel is a fundamental
insight.  I also have to put in this category an otherwise very useful
article by John Verhaar in Studies in Language from five or so years
back; if you read it carefully, however, it might be a good place to
look.



-- 
       Rod Johnson  *  rcj@caen.engin.umich.edu  *  (313) 764-3103
    
                "What I do doesn't happen in a warehouse"
                                          --Jim Dickinson
Newsgroups: sci.lang