Abundant evidence now shows that many words of spoken languages are iconic to varying degrees. That is – the forms of many words, to a greater or lesser extent, resemble an aspect of their meaning. These findings raise new questions about languages and their evolution. What is the function of iconicity, and why are some words more iconic than others? And from a diachronic perspective, how do words become more or less iconic over time? To answer these questions, it is critical to understand how iconicity varies across the lexicons of spoken languages. In this talk, I present a series of studies that examine iconicity across the vocabularies of English and Spanish by asking native speakers to rate the iconicity of words (~3000 English words, ~600 Spanish). The results suggest that iconicity is influenced by factors relating to word learning, grammatical category, and semantics.

Contact:

Marcus Perlman, PhD, University of California and visitor at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen