Abstract:

There is currently an upsurge in research questioning the arbitrariness of the sign: bouba and kiki have spawned a cottage industry of behavioural studies in psychology, and work in linguistics reveals the prevalence of ideophones, iconic sensory words found in many non-Western languages. In the flurry of excitement it is easy to lose sight of the fact that arbitrariness is here to stay — just not on its own. I make a case for complementing the cherished principle of arbitrariness with at least two further types of associations between form and meaning: iconicity and systematicity. Iconicity is grounded in perceptual analogies between aspects of form and meaning, while systematicity involves a statistical relationship between the sound patterns of group of words and their grammatical usage. Why do different form-to-meaning correspondences coexist in natural languages? I will show that arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity each have their own advantages and disadvantages in communication, language learning and processing. Words are not just abstract labels; they are tools, and the way they are learned and used influences their shape. Focusing on iconicity, I will discuss some recent experimental work that probes how iconic words facilitate learning and how they evolve over time in an iterated communication game.

Contact:

Mark Dingemanse, Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands