LINGUIST List 3.664

Fri 04 Sep 1992

Sum: iconicity

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1. bert peeters, 000

A week or so ago, I asked for definitions (preferably in French, but
English was OK) of "iconicity". From Rod Johnson (rcjengin.umich.edu) came the
 following reply

>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.

Other references I obtained (thanks to Laurie Bauer, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy,
 Patrick Jost, Cameron Shelley and Ron Smyth) include the following:

Raimo Anttila, Historical and comparative linguistics (Benjamins)

Justus Buchler, Philosophical writings of Peirce (Dover)

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Current morphology (Routledge 1992; ch. 8)

Wolfgang U. Dressler et al., Leitmotifs in natural morphology (Benjamins 1987;
 p. 17)

M. Kilani-Schoch, Introduction a la morphologie naturelle (Lang 1988)

Geoffrey Leech, Principles of pragmatics (Longman 1983; p. 68)

Michael Shapiro, Asymmetry (North-Holland)

Elisabeth Walter, Allgemeine Zeichenlehre (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt)ce for
 linguists