bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Iconicity in conceptual blending
Authors: Glyn Wilson David
Published: March 2014

In 1890, William Morris, pioneering writer, designer, and revolutionary socialist, published News from Nowhere. In this utopian romance, he expresses his aesthetic and social convictions most convincingly not through propositional argumentation, but instead through iconic conceptual/material anchors set up to support conceptual blending networks through which the reader is guided to conjure up human-scale scenes and contexts. These conceptual integration networks achieve compression (and decompression) of vital relations (such as identity, change, or time) in blended mental spaces, heightening the aesthetic, emotional, and hence persuasive potential of the text, often at key points in its structure. This paper explores several passages from News from Nowhere, arguing that motivated non-metaphorical conceptual/material anchors can be just as iconic as metaphorical ones.
Iconicity and intermediality in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy
Authors: Rippl Gabriele
Published: March 2014

Charles Simic’s collection of prose poems Dime-Store Alchemy. The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992) pays homage to one of America’s greatest surrealist visual artists, whose work Simic reactivates in American cultural memory. Simic’s poems, which are presented as boxes to approximate Cornell’s visual techniques, have been investigated by literary scholars for their ekphrastic verbal means but the strategies of iconicity and intermediality have been neglected. Against the backdrop of recent debates about intermediality and iconicity in postmodern culture, the article sheds light on Simic’s highly self-reflexive intersemiotic translations and transformations and his intricate art of visual iconicity which foregrounds the iconic character of verbal signs. While trying to evoke visual and pictorial qualities via language, Simic’s poems, just like other ekphrastic texts which combine iconic and indexical functions of language, investigate the specificities of and tensions between verbal and visual media.
Unveiling creative subplots through the non-traditional application of diagrammatic iconicity
Authors: James Andrew
Published: March 2014

In literary terms, diagrammatic iconicity has generally been understood to refer to a patterned series of linguistic or syntactic textual connections. But taking a broader view of diagrammatic iconicity reveals previously invisible creative subtexts. In Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man (1969), critics have failed to see that Amis once again offers a fictional portrait of a former publisher. In his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954) L.S Caton was based on R.A. Caton, the operator of the small press that published Amis’s own Bright November (1947). Caton would return for cameos in each of the next six novels, until he was killed off in The Anti-Death League (1966). Perhaps critics simply forgot about Amis’s habit of venting lingering irritation with previous publishers, but the depiction of Victor Gollancz in The Green Man, his ninth novel, has gone unnoticed. Gollancz’s presence in the text clearly conveys the importance of artistic freedom, which only becomes apparent when iconic principles are applied.
The iconic indexicality of photography
Authors: Sadowski Piotr
Published: March 2014

The unique visual appeal of photography results from combining the basically iconic code (resemblance between image and referent) with indexicality. Photography is indexical insofar as the represented object is “imprinted” by light and the chemical (or electronic) process on the image, creating a visual likeness that possesses a degree of accuracy and “truthfulness” unattainable in purely iconic signs such as painting, drawing, or sculpture. The indexical origin of the photographic image explains why discussions of the photographic media (including film and television) often employ categories normally reserved for the emotive and irrational effects produced in traditional societies by sympathetic magic, with its objectively wrong but psychologically compelling sense of direct causal link between objects once physically connected but later separated. The essay discusses the iconic indexicality in the context of its historic antecedents such as imprints of hands, death masks, wax effigies, shadow portraits, and experiments with camera obscura.
Unbinding the text
Authors: Ljungberg Christina
Published: March 2014

Intermediality concerns either the transgression of the boundaries between conventionally distinct media or the iconic enactment of one medium within another. How does this function in such a complex multimedia work as Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which not only comments on other media but also addresses all other adaptations of Shakespeare’s play? How is the figure of dislocation – shipwrecks, loss of home and culture, the disorientation generated by Prospero’s masques – translated into Greenaway’s postmodern adaptation? To what degree does adaptation itself involve dislocation as Shakespeare’s figuration of dislocation resonates throughout Greenaway’s multimedia reworking of this text into contemporary sensibilities? Not only does the film self-reflexively perform the very process of adaptation but by ‘destructuring’ – or dislocating – the text into images, it also creates a visual vocabulary articulating a new order of reading and suggesting a new visual literacy.
Argumentative, iconic, and indexical structures in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin
Authors: Maeder Costantino
Published: March 2014

Schubert’s The Fair Miller-Maid (1823), based on a collection of lyrics by Wilhelm Müller, is characterized by piano accompaniments that consist mainly in the iconic imitation of real world sounds and of the main character’s mood, musical strategies which any listener accustomed to classical music may recognize without knowing harmonic structures. Many claim that Schubert’s music simply illustrates and heightens Müller’s original text but his interpretation of Müller’s poems cannot be reduced to a superficial illustration. The partition shows that Schubert created a simple world of iconically determined sound patterns (flowing brook, hunter’s horn, patterns signifying death), which are quoted unusually often and varied in the very first four Lieder. These iconic, musical words, created dynamically, can contradict the song texts in the following Lieder. Another iconic device uses the opposition of minor and major tonalities, tied to illusion and reality.
John Irving’s A Widow for One Year and Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor as ‘(mult-)i-conic’ works of art
Authors: Schwanecke Christine
Published: March 2014

This article explores the various layers of iconicity in John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, which abounds in iconic images, diagrams and metaphors, and Todd Williams’ movie adaptation, The Door in the Floor. Intra-medial and intermedial forms of iconicity are brought into focus, as they weave the complex web of cross-, self- and meta-references out of which the novel’s semantic density emerges, building up the illusion of an enhanced ‘visuality’. The media transfer of the novel to film is also examined: to what extent has the novel’s predominant feature, its ‘(mult-)i-conicity’, been transferred to Williams’ movie? Beyond aesthetic questions, medial idiosyncrasies have required structural and material changes and Williams had to abandon some iconic signs, modify others, or establish new forms of iconicity, i.e. audio-visual ones. Despite the differences, the movie’s web of semantic and structural correspondences has become as dense as the one in Irving’s text.
Iconicity by blending
Authors: Turner Mark
Published: March 2014

The role of blending in iconicity is often unmistakable. More subtly, blending is usually in the first instance the generator of the seemingly basic similarity of form and meaning that makes the perception of iconicity possible.
The Bashō code
Authors: Hiraga Masako K. , Ross Háj
Published: March 2014

“Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew;  it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all. ” R. H. Blyth in Haiku (1952)This paper looks at the rhetorical structure of the two haiku texts by Bashō, which display formal and semantic similarities. After giving a brief explanation of the texts, the detailed analysis presents: (i) how the global metaphor of SILENCE IS SOUND connects the two texts, and (ii) how this metaphor navigates diagrammatic interpretations in the revising process, grammatical structure, and phonology across the texts. In our analysis, we hope to illustrate that metaphor and diagram could be treated as an entwined process across multiple texts, and that this type of approach could provide a new interpretation and explication of the interrelated haiku in question.
Iconicity in gotoochi-kitii ‘localized  Hello Kitty’
Authors: Toratani Kiyoko
Published: March 2014

This paper explores the form-meaning-referent relationship of a compound noun, gotoochi-kitii ‘localized Hello Kitty’, which denotes a small souvenir figurine featuring a Japanese commercial character, Hello Kitty. It argues that the diagrammatic iconicity observed in English noun-noun compounds (e.g. Ungerer 1999) is also at work in this recently coined Japanese compound. Further, iconicity plays an important part in the process of image construction. An iconic image of a local entity metonymically selected into the domain of gotoochi ‘local area’ (source) is mapped onto an image selected into the domain of Hello Kitty (target) based on kitty-is-an-agent (or ‑undergoer) metaphor. Deviation from the basic one-to-one mapping pattern leads to a creation of more complex images. Blending theory allows us to detail the mechanisms of this type of image construction.
Grammar-internal mimicking and analogy
Authors: Conradie C. Jac
Published: March 2014

Mimicking is a form of imitation according to which a construction or part-construction is inserted in its most typical or recognisable form in a morphological or syntactic context without regard to its proper grammatical integration. The purpose of mimicking rather than adapting a structure is inter alia to maintain or enhance the expressivity of the construction for reasons of economy. A mimicked structure is typically recognisable by a grammatical ‘clash’ or incongruity with its context. Three types of mimicking will be distinguished and analysed. As mimicking and analogy share imitation as a typical trait, the two processes are compared extensively. The types of analogy selected for purposes of comparison, are proportional analogy and paradigm levelling as the ‘canonical’ types of analogy, and extension and blending as two ‘peripheral’ types. The main conclusion arrived at is that mimicking and analogy in its canonical form are two distinct processes, but that a certain measure of overlap is found between mimicking, extension and blending.
Spatiotemporal aspects of iconicity
Authors: Elleström Lars
Published: March 2014

This article is part of a larger research project that aims to identify a methodical way of investigating iconicity in the immensely rich field of media, which includes art and other kinds of communication. The first part of the paper focuses on the intimate connection between sensory perception and cognition and sketches a basis for analyzing multimodal iconicity (which involves, for instance, several sensory modes or several spatiotemporal modes). The second part scrutinizes Peirce’s notions of image, diagram, and metaphor and argues that these three types of iconicity should be seen as a continuum that ranges from sensorially ‘strong’ to ‘weak’ iconicity and from cognitively ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ iconicity. The third part of the paper analyzes some examples of multimodal iconicity, with specific emphasis on spatiotemporal multimodality (for instance, spatial signs representing temporal objects, such as graphs representing population growth); earlier semiotic research has not dealt with this subject in a systematic way.
The iconized letter
Authors: White John J.
Published: March 2014

This paper examines forms of iconization in the case of individual letters of the alphabet that use innovative techniques which depart from earlier methods of generating shaped poetry. The iconized letter is shown to function as a sui generis device deployed in individual poems and as the signature of entire literary movements. Contrasts are explored between the Cubo-Futurists’ experiments with the Russian alphabet involving the iconic features of individual Cyrillic letters and French Lettrisme’s construction of shaped images based on multiple repetitions of single letters of the French alphabet in order to create multi-dimensional visual effects. The conclusion sets out a series of observations concerning the significance of the iconized letter for future semiotic approaches to shaped poetry in general.
The semantics of structure
Authors: Heusser Martin
Published: March 2014

One of the salient characteristics of Modernism, particularly of its early phases, is a new and different attitude towards the visual aspects of literary texts. Poets like E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams begin to exploit the visuality of their texts as an additional, important means of expression – often by means of iconicity. Both use mainly diagrammatic iconicity with isomorphic function but in different ways. Many of the texts concerned, particularly in the case of Cummings, are visually ostentatious, striking or simply strange but recalcitrant to interpretation. The poetics both of Cummings and of Williams have strong affinities with Romantic ideas about the function of literature, and both poets share a particular interest in short-circuiting the vicissitudes of linguistic meaning-making.
Visual iconicity in Latin poetry
Authors: Dainotti Paolo
Published: March 2014

This paper aims to assess the role of visual iconicity in Latin poetry. Even though major Latin poems include, indeed, a good deal of verses that succeed in recreating mimetically the subject matter by exploiting the potential of word ordering – a good case in point is Aen. IV 165 speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem, where the word order enables the reader to visualize Dido and Aeneas inside the cave – to date visual iconicity has not attracted very much attention from classical scholars. By singling out the major patterns of visual iconicity in Latin poetry, this paper will make a case for its relevance to literary history. It will reinforce, through textual evidence, the non-arbitrariness of the iconic interpretation applied to classical texts.
Shared and direct experiential iconicity in digital reading games
Authors: Mooijer Hans
Published: March 2014

This paper deals with interactivity’s effects on certain instances of experiential iconicity in Gregory Weir’s digital reading game Silent Conversation. Two new terms are proposed in this paper: ‘shared experiential iconicity’ and ‘direct experiential iconicity’. The former term attempts to account for instances in which a reader’s interaction with signs in digital text enables a simulation of a text’s character’s interpreted emotive response to a given situation in the text. The latter term is one that describes a hypothetical situation in which signs are linked iconically to a reader’s psychological state during reading through a number of (bodily) measurements. This would lead to a continuous feedback loop being established between readers’ psychological states and signs, which could prove beneficial for readers with reading disorders.
Model and icon
Authors: Steiner Wendy
Published: March 2014

Models and modeling function as themes or representational subjects in a striking number of recent literary, pictorial, and filmic works. This sudden currency is explained here through indexical and iconic characteristics of models. Since they are historical entities, works about models indicate art’s relation to extra-artistic reality, often gesturing as well to the reality of the artist, audience, and ‘contact’. The model’s likeness to its image opens a potential for reversibility between them, which artists can use in exploring hierarchy. By anchoring art in reality and signifying reciprocity and equality, model-themed art blurs the line between ethics and aesthetics. Thus, in contemporary culture the aesthetic function would no longer be Roman Jakobson’s formalist “set toward the message”, but instead a set toward the interaction.
Degrees of indetermination  in intersemiotic translation
Authors: Dusi Nicola
Published: March 2014

Discussing the problem of ‘intersemiotic translation’ from literature to film Eco (2003) maintains that an adaptation inevitably explicates the unsaid, showing and therefore establishing a point of view precisely where the novel is vaguest. In my opinion a movie can create variable degrees of ‘indetermination’. Its peculiar status as a syncretic semiotic system gives the cinematic text plenty of scope for narrative, ‘figurative’ (i.e. iconic) and discursive implications (Greimas 1984). The audiovisual image may be deliberately open to interpretations and free to not-show and not-say and can create potential elements of indetermination that enable the target text to translate the ambiguities and the semantic open-endedness of the source text. To illustrate these issues of indetermination I will use Smoke by Wayne Wang (USA 1995).
Sound, image and fake realism
Authors: Spaziante Lucio
Published: March 2014

This article aims to highlight the conventional semiotic processes linking sound to image in audiovisuals. Examples drawn from contemporary cinema apply the sound dimension as a field of experimentation, attempting to find what can be defined as the ‘intrinsic iconic properties’ of sound. The article’s focus is on the continuum between realism and anti-realism in the audiovisual sound/image relation, as well as on the association/dissociation between sound and image as a terrain for unusual narrative possibilities. The fashion for using the sound dimension in audiovisuals further underlines its constructed and artificial character, as it constantly searches for a relationship with an ‘authentic reality’.
Opera, oratorio, and iconic strategies
Authors: Maeder Costantino
Published: March 2014

Iconic structures pervade Opera and Oratorio. While recitative relies mainly on imagic iconic strategies (imitation of the prosody of common speech), arias seem to rely more on diagrammatic iconic strategies and symbolism. A recitative is straightforward, dynamic: music follows the spoken word whereas an aria ties the text to periodic-symmetric musical structures and to melodies that defy prosody. However, we will show that imagic iconicity determines arias as well as the oriented succession of recitative and aria, the basic unit of an opera. What characterizes arias is that they mostly mime behaviour of people who suffer from stress: repetition of syllables, words, syntagmata, and sentences; use of common places, altered pitch of the voice, incomprehensible syntax, etc.
On some iconic strategies in concept albums within the Italian singer-songwriter tradition
Authors: Ferrari Sebastiano
Published: March 2014

This contribution will focus on the recurring iconic patterns originating from the combination of music and lyrics within the Italian singer-songwriter tradition. The main work to be examined is Storia di un impiegato by Fabrizio De André, while some attention will also be paid to Il giorno aveva cinque teste; the latter is the first album originating from the collaboration between the poet Roberto Roversi and the singer and composer Lucio Dalla. The type of iconicity present in these works arises from the interplay of music, performance style and lyrics, proceeding from the meaning of the text towards the form of the music or the purposely created sound effects. Iconicity here may range from a more direct representation of the object (iconic image) to a more abstract reference to it (iconic diagram). Music seems to contextually corroborate the meaning of the words (parameters such as major and minor harmonies, rapid or slow tempos, constant or variable ranges of pitch and dynamics are taken into account) and to guide the listener’s attention whilst listening to the albums.
The lexical iconicity hierarchy and its grammatical correlates
Authors: Akita Kimi
Published: March 2014

This paper proposes an integrated account of the formal and functional non-uniformity exhibited by sound-symbolic words based on a hierarchy of lexical iconicity (i.e., iconicity of words). It is argued that the more iconic a vocalized sign is, the less strongly it is constrained by the linguistic system. This crosslinguistic generalization is instantiated by the lexical availability, morphophonology, syntax, semantics, and acquisition of sound-symbolic words.
Prosodic iconicity and experiential blending
Authors: Auchlin Antoine
Published: March 2014

In order to account for prosodic iconicity in speech in a very general way we propose looking at the phenomenon from an experiential and embodied perspective (Núñez 1999; Violi 2003; Rohrer 2007, i.a.), defining communication as a “co-experienciation” process. Using different paths, prosodic dimensions’ variations impose direct, non-mediated shaping of shared experience. Prosodic iconic formations take place in that space of shared experience. The way it mixes with meaning may be schematized using Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory. We suggest (following Hutchins 2005; Bache 2005) some accommodation of the schema in order to take into account the perceptual dimension of part of the blending input, as well as the experiential dimension of blending output.
Emotional McGurk effect and gender difference – A Swedish study
Authors: Abelin Åsa
Published: March 2014

The study concerns the integration of visual and auditive information in the perception of emotions. Speakers expressed the five emotions happy, angry, surprised, afraid and disgusted, saying “hallo, hallo”. Audio and video were separated and combined to form 13 mismatching stimuli. Perceivers interpreted the stimuli in accordance with the face, the voice, or as another emotion. Perceivers relied more on the face than on the voice, and were better at interpreting the face of the person of their own sex. Females were better at interpreting the visual channel and males better at interpreting the auditive channel. The findings are consistent with reports that although happiness is an easily recognizable facial expression it is more difficult to identify in the voice.
Pragmatic functions and the biological codes
Authors: Zarka Dina El
Published: March 2014

I argue in this paper that the intonational marking of information structure is mainly based on iconic principles relying on the effects of the frequency code (Ohala 1983; Gussenhoven 2002) and the effort code (Gussenhoven 2002). It will be shown that different information structures can be disambiguated, if, in addition to prominence relations, tonal properties are taken into account. Following Lambrecht (1994), I argue for a distinction between pragmatic relations (topic and rhematic focus), which are realized by tonal shape (high/rising or low/falling) and pragmatic properties (focus of interest) realized by prominence. Specifically, it is suggested that deaccenting is only a special case of downtoning, which is also employed in EA to mark presupposed material.
Pitch accent types and the perception of focus in Majorcan Catalan wh-questions
Authors: del Mar Vanrell Maria
Published: March 2014

This paper aims to investigate whether two intonational nuclear configurations found in Majorcan Catalan wh-questions, the falling nuclear configuration and the rising-falling one, correspond to a difference in the function of focus or whether, on the contrary, this intonational difference is mainly based on speaker attitudes conveying a neutral meaning (the falling contour) as opposed to a meaning of surprise or interest (the rising-falling contour). To this end, one production experiment and two perception experiments were carried out. Taken together, the results point to an informational and also an affective interpretation of the Effort Code (Gussenhoven 2002, 2004). Thus, even though the two intonational nuclear configurations correspond to a difference in the function of focus, they are also linked to speaker attitudes such as irritation, disapproval or reproach.
UK declarative rises and the frequency code
Authors: Hirst Daniel
Published: March 2014

One of the most often-cited generalisations about intonation is that in a majority of languages from all over the world, falling intonation is systematically associated with statements and rising intonation with questions and continuations. John Ohala’s frequency code (1983), according to which high pitch symbolises small and weak while low pitch symbolises big and strong, is an attempt to provide a psychological basis for this generalisation. There are however counter-examples to this universal tendency. (i) Several languages (Danish, Finnish, Western Arabic) (Hirst & Di Cristo 1998) are reported not to use rising pitch for questions, although there may be a global raising of pitch. (ii) A number of Urban Northern British (UNB) accents (Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool, Birmingham, Tyneside) (Cruttenden 1986) are well known for the opposite violation of this general tendancy in that they systematically use rising pitch at the end of what are clearly statements. In one of the first descriptions of the UNB rising patterns, Knowles (1975) suggested that this pattern could be of Celtic origin (he calls them ‘Irish falls’ “which, perversely, go up.”), since the speakers of the Liverpool dialect which he studied (Scouse) were mostly of Irish origin. Cruttenden (1994) questioned this hypothesis, since while it would account for most of the UNB cities, it would not account for Tyneside (Pellow & Jones 1977). Cruttenden cites evidence that the Irish population there was almost inexistant before 1830 and that the Scots who lived in this area were mainly from the Eastern lowland regions where the pattern is not observed, whereas there is documentary evidence that the “Tyneside Tone” was well established before the nineteenth century. The hypothesis also fails to explain why the pattern is found in only some parts of the Celtic speaking areas of Britain but not in others (Southern Ireland, Wales, Eastern Scotland). A very tentative historical explanation for this distribution will be suggested. The article will conclude with the presentation of a new hypothesis concerning a possible origin for this intonation pattern, showing that, rather unexpectedly, it could be interpreted as an illustration of the frequency code, despite the fact that it appears to be doing exactly the opposite.
Iconic interpretation of rhythm in speech
Authors: Pršir Tea , Simon Anne-Catherine
Published: March 2014

Approaches to iconicity are most often related to fundamental frequency (Ohala 1984). This article examines to what extent rhythm in speech is perceived and interpreted iconically. Iconic rhythmic patterns that imitate part of the lexical or syntactic content have no codified meaning in the system of a language. On the other hand, scansion or variation in speech rate and tempo may act as contextualization cues (Gumperz 1992). We propose to distinguish between three types of rhythmic iconicity: iconicity on a local (word or phrase) and on a global (utterance or sequence of utterances) level, and contextualization provoked by contrast between sequences. Keywords: rhythm; iconicity; radio press reviews; corpus
Iconicity of melodic contours in French
Authors: Martin Philippe
Published: March 2014

This paper explores some iconic properties of melodic contours in French as vocal gestures possibly similar to other kinds of body gesture or to gestures in general. The melodic contours considered specifically are correlative to the conclusive sentence modality, the continuation majeure and the postfix or theme in a rheme-theme division of the sentence.
A study of postural, mimetic and gestural indicators combined with prosodic indicators
Authors: Gosson Véronique
Published: March 2014

We describe in the following pages a subset of the experiments as well as some of the results gathered in the context of our doctoral dissertation, defended in April 2008. The aim of our research was to show both the semantic and pragmatic value of certain types of nonverbal expression. We therefore conducted a study of perceptions of postural, mimetic and gestural (PMG) elements and of prosodic indicators in order to compare perceptions of certain feelings and attitudes in French, on the basis of visually enacted oral discourse, using several advertising films. In this article, after specifying the various theoretical fields used for our study, we will present an experiment concerning the perception of the attitudes of anger, determination, threat, involvement and conviction, enthusiasm, perplexity, command, Questioning and dissatisfaction, as they are expressed from consistent PMG elements conveying the objects of the “Totext” by native speakers of a language (the control group) and non-native informants, FFL learners from American, Chinese and Japanese cultures, in order to determine their ability for making correlations between the visual and auditory dimensions.
Literary practices and imaginative possibilities
Authors: Colapietro Vincent
Published: March 2014

Adopting a pragmatic approach to iconicity, this paper focuses on literary practices as imaginative undertakings, thus practices bound up with the projection of possibilities. Literary texts need not claim as their raison d’être anything more than the projection and exploration of diverse forms of possibility. The exhibition of such forms is intimately linked to the iconic features of literary texts. At the same time, in exhibiting the barely imaginable, they frequently embody traces of brute actuality and intimations of elusive significance. Thus, the work of iconic signs is, in literary texts, characteristically conjoined to that of indices and symbols. Moving from this level of generality to the way such texts work, in particular, to some of the iconic functions in literature, I will consider, above all else, the diagrammatic function of literary texts. Here, the sentences inscribed across a page are at once verbal diagrams and, in however attenuated a form, spatial diagrams. As diagrams of such a hybrid character, they are capable of presenting spatial, temporal, and other relationships, though the spatial features of such verbal diagrams often bear anything but a straightforward relationship to their imaginable objects. Such inscribed diagrams are spatial figurations in which the most salient features of spatiality are in certain respects exploited and, in other respects, effaced or, at least, suspended. A number of examples from literature (including texts by Henry James, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, among others) are used to substantiate these claims.
The bell jar, the maze and the mural
Authors: Ljungberg Christina
Published: March 2014

The practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated, for example, the cartographical procedure by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented, are themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings). Literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimensions of these complex procedures, turning them into stages on which subjectivity is played out. Looking at texts by John Banville (The Sea), Carole Shields (Larry’s Party) and Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion), I will argue that diagrammatic figurations in narrative texts involve not only performance and performativity but also strongly enhance the complex interaction between narrativity and visuality as they transform the text into a stage on which textual activity is performed, (1) as a dramatic dialogue between writer, text and reader and (2) in the dramatic and visual positionings of agents within the text itself. Three kinds of textual performance of subjectivity can be discerned in the diagrammatic figurations in these three novels: on the diegetic level, as the subjectivity performed by the characters and, especially, the narrators as instances of performativity that is established and maintained in relation to both author and reader; on the level of the author, whose subjectivity is textually performed as self-expression; finally, on the level of reception, as the subjectivity of the reader is itself established performatively in the act of reading.
Iconicity as meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form
Authors: Elleström Lars
Published: March 2014

Iconicity consists of mimetic relations between form and meaning. This article is based on the notion of ‘spatial thinking’ and it is argued that there is no form without meaning, and that all meaning has some sort of form. Two fundamental distinctions are used. The first is Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known division into three types of iconicity: image, diagram, and metaphor, which is extended to include ‘weak’ and ‘strong diagrams’. The second is a distinction between ontologically different appearances of signs: visual material signs, auditory material signs, and complex cognitive signs. A two-dimensional model illustrating the relations between these two distinctions is presented. The model is based on the assumption that iconicity, to a certain extent, is gradable, and it shows that the field of iconicity includes many phenomena that are not generally seen as related, but that nevertheless can be systematically compared. It also shows, among other things, that the ‘metaphor’ and the ‘weak diagram’ are singled out by the capacity of miming across the borders both between the visual and the auditory, and between the material and the mental. The main argument of the article is that iconicity should be understood not only as “form miming meaning and form miming form”, but also as “meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form”.
A view from the margins
Authors: Johl Ronél
Published: March 2014

The focus of this essay is the little known contribution to the field of literary iconicity by Afrikaans literary theorists in the seventies and eighties in South Africa, especially the research done by H.C.T. Müller. The rationale for this is my contention that the theory of literary iconicity put forward by Müller might be used both to shed light on some of the problems that contemporary iconicity theorists, like Paul Bouissac and others, experience with aspects of the current research conducted within the framework of the (New) Iconicity Research Project and to perhaps point the way to a consolidation of current views in a comprehensive theory of iconicity.
Iconic and indexical elements in Italian Futurist poetry
Authors: White John J.
Published: March 2014

This paper offers close readings of canonical works of Italian Futurist visual poetry, focussing on the fusion, for propaganda purposes, of radical forms of visual and acoustic iconicity with politicized modes of indexicality. A detailed contextual interpretation of a milestone iconic-cum-indexical device in F. T. Marinetti’s war epic Zang tumb tumb (1914) serves as an introduction to Futurism’s preoccupation with the advantages of exploiting ingenious new forms of semiosis for their nationalist impact. Subsequent commentaries on four shaped war-poems by Marinetti bring out the variety of ways in which iconic representations of battle experience are harnessed to Italy’s Irredentist and Interventionist causes. The poems’ impressive arsenal of iconic effects is shown to reinforce their indexical function as war-reportage, while Marinetti’s dual authority as renowned modernist poet and eyewitness to a number of historically prestigious battles underwrites Italian Futurism’s patriotic campaign to persuade fellow countrymen to abandon their neutralist stance.
Taking a line for a walk
Authors: Plooy Heilna du
Published: March 2014

In this article various aspects of iconicity in three poems by the Afrikaans poet T.T. Cloete are analysed and discussed. In the poems the poet uses words to describe a line which “draws” the outline of an object. This technique is interpreted as a referred form of referentiality which transfers attention from the (referential) object to the poetic interpretation of the object in the poem and to the poem itself. Apart from the diagrammatic iconicity in the use of a “represented” diagram, the technical complexity of the poems also suggest the use of imagic and metaphoric iconicity on account of the use of typographical features as well as literary and cultural allusions. Using Lotman’s distinction between the semantic, the poetical and the cultural aspects of semantic value, the poems are analysed and interpreted. The main aim of the article is to indicate the ways in which iconic features, on the linguistic, poetical and cultural level, add to the ability of poems to generate multi­layered meaning.
The poem as icon of the painting
Authors: Beukes Marthinus
Published: March 2014

The focus of this paper is to investigate the poetic expression of a painting as it is transposed into a poem. Such an interaction between the verbal and the visual text results in what Simonides of Ceos describes as “poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens” — the poem is a speaking painting, the painting is a silent poem. How does the poem become such a depiction or representation of the painting? Assuming that the poem contributes to the significance of the painting by adding additional layers of meaning to it, the iconic aspects in the poem text therefore suggest the painting’s content as its visual embodiment. In the following discussion, I will argue that the iconic meaning-making processes taking place in Tom Gouws’s (2010) Vermeer poems function as a meta-language of the paintings. I will suggest a descriptive framework for delineating the iconic processes that are present in and around Gouws’s poetic texts in order to try to show that the poet not only explores the painting’s visual text but also investigates and confronts language iconically in several of his poems based on Vermeer’s paintings, e.g. “The Astronomer”, “The Geographer”, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”, ‘“Lady Weighing Pearls” and “The Men of Vermeer”. This comes however particularly to the fore in his poem “The lacemaker’ ” which will be read in conjunction with another of Gouws’s poems, “ars poetica”. These two poems will be read as verbal figurations of visual writing through which a particular kind of iconic narrative is established.
Iconicity typological and theological
Authors: Purdy Strother B.
Published: March 2014

The extensive writings on language of the Prussian “pansemiotician” Johan Georg Hamann (1730–1788) provide a rich field for inquiry. The icon of breathing in his “New Apology for the Letter H” is satirical yet finally theological in a richly allusive manner. Only 150 years later, in the form of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, its iconicity equally unexplored, would appear a work of genius as abtruse, its author as myriadminded and delighted with bawdy as Hamann. Within it lies another iconical “H”, the first initial of its omnifarious hero, equally concerned with breathing and the soul. Nothing in literary history formed the link we can see here; it is a matter of iconicity pure and simple.
An iconic, analogical approach to grammaticalization
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: March 2014

This paper addresses a number of problems connected with the ‘apparatus’ used in grammaticalization theory. It will be argued that we get a better grip on what happens in processes of grammaticalization (and its ‘opposite’, lexicalization) if the process is viewed in terms of analogical processes, which are part of our general cognitive abilities. These analogical processes are connected with the modes of iconic and indexical thinking, which are prior to and underlie the mode of symbolic thinking (cf. Deacon 1997). I will make use of a simple analogical or usage-based grammar model, in which a distinction is made between processes taking place on a token level and those taking place on a type level. The model also involves taking more notice of the form of linguistic signs and of the synchronic grammar system at each stage of the grammaticalization process. This model will then be used on a classic example of grammaticalization (or subjectification), involving the modal verbs in the history of English. It will show that analogy lies at the basis of this grammaticalization process, and it will illustrate at the same time that the problems with scope, noted by Tabor and Traugott (1998), can also be dealt with if the process is seen as being steered by analogy.
Iconic signs, motivated semantic networks, and the nature of conceptualization
Authors: Herlofsky William J.
Published: March 2014

This chapter attempts to demonstrate how certain mental space images are structurally reflected in their corresponding iconic signs in Japan Sign Language (JSL). Section one provides a general introduction, and section two offers a brief summary of the framework developed by Tyler and Evans (2001, 2003) for explaining the relationship among imagic proto-scenes, spatial scenes, and polysemy, used throughout the chapter. In section three, detailed illustrations of the polysemy network formed by such proto-scenes for the English preposition ‘over’ are provided and then compared with numerous related JSL signs. In section four, it is conclud-ed that the proto-scenes proposed by Tyler and Evans appear to be reflected rather directly in the related iconic signs of JSL, providing indirect support for the existence of such imagic proto-scenes.
Iconicity and subjectivisation in the English NP
Authors: González-Díaz Victorina
Published: March 2014

Through a corpus-based study of the behaviour of little (ME-PDE), the paper explores (a) the effects of processes of subjectivisation (vid. De Smet and Verstraete 2006) on the syntactic configuration of the English NP and (b) how these latter relate to key iconicity postulates. More specifically, it suggests that, at least from the 19th century onwards, little has been developing ‘affix-like’ affective functions (e.g. a little minute) that appear to challenge the much-cited association between subjectivisation and leftward movement (cf. Adamson 2000) and that assert the role of cultural salience in iconically-driven processes of change.
Iconicity and developments in translation studies
Authors: Naudé Jacobus A.
Published: March 2014

A fundamental issue with reference to the translation process concerns the type of relation between the original and the translated text. Peirce indicates three possibilities: icon, index and symbol. For many scholars it is a given that the relation of similarity between the original text and the translated text predominates and that the iconic relation ordinarily describes the character of translation. However, evidence is provided in this paper to show from a theoretical viewpoint (i.e. from that of translation studies) and a practical viewpoint (with examples provided) that a relationship between source text and target text which is characterised as iconic can only be weakly iconic because a target text can never fully resemble its source text in every respect linguistically and culturally. Furthermore in certain cases an indexical or symbolic relationship rather than an iconic one may even predominate. Since the 1980s, discourses about translation have broadened steadily. An outflow of these developments is a greater understanding of the superordinate categories of translation and the fact that the relation between source and target text is no longer only one of resemblance (i.e. iconicity). An example of iconicity from the Koran and its translation is provided as evidence for a predominant, but weak iconic relationship between source text and target text. Examples from the Sesotho Bible translation and Das neue Testament illustrate that the predominant relationship can also be indexical or symbolic (rather than iconic), respectively.
Phonetic and phonological approaches to early word recognition
Authors: Escudero Paola , Benders Titia
Published: March 2014

This paper reviews two methodological paradigms and three theoretical proposals put forward to investigate infants’ sensitivity to phonetic detail in early word recognition. The results of studies using the first methodological paradigm suggest that infants are unable to use phonetic detail when accessing the representations of newly learned words. In contrast, infants tested using the second methodological paradigm generally succeed at identifying small differences between words. The three theoretical proposals differ in the extent to which they can explain the rate of success in infant word recognition. Methodological adaptations and new research directions to bridge the gap between methodologies and theories are presented.
Scope assignment in child language
Authors: Gualmini Andrea , Unsworth Sharon
Published: March 2014

This paper focuses on recent work on children’s interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences. We review current literature on the topic and we discuss two theoretical notions, namely the notion of surface scope and the notion of Question Under Discussion (QUD). We argue that both notions are theoretically motivated but pertain to different domains. In particular, in agreement with current literature, we acknowledge that notions defined over the syntax-semantics mapping are psychologically real and play a role in determining the number of interpretations that are available for any given sentence (see Fox 2000). However, we propose that inverse scope and surface scope are equally available to the psychological parser. In particular, we argue that ambiguity resolution is guided by contextual congruence rather than by considerations about the syntaxsemantics mapping.
Looking at anaphora
Authors: Koornneef Arnout W.
Published: March 2014

The Primitives of Binding model (Reuland 2001) presents a linguistic framework to explain the complex pattern of anaphora (reflexives and pronominals) across a large number of languages, i.e. it has theoretical validity. The model consist of a syntactic, semantic and discourse module and, furthermore, incorporates an economy hierarchy: syntactic anaphoric dependencies require less processing resources than semantic anaphoric dependencies, which in turn are cheaper than discourse anaphoric dependencies. I will discuss the results of three eye-tracking experiments which suggest that this economy hierarchy is reflected in real time anaphora comprehension. Hence, the model has psychological reality as well. The implications of this conclusion will be illustrated by comparing a real time version of the model to Friederici’s (2002) neurocognitive approach to language comprehension.
Theoretical validity and psychological reality of the grammatical code
Authors: Neeleman Ad , Koot Hans van de
Published: March 2014

One interpretation of the competence-performance distinction is that the grammar is a knowledge base consulted by the performance systems. We argue for an alternative interpretation, according to which the grammar and the performance systems are theories of the same object, but at different levels of description. This does not mean that the grammar is reduced to the performance systems. It is fundamental in explaining properties of these systems, as it expresses constraints on their design that generalize across specific computational procedures. We base our argument on considerations of computational effi ciency, a comparison with other information-processing systems and evolutionary considerations.