The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language
Will be published approx. on 16. January 2026
Book
Hardback
1040 pages
978-0-19-284948-9 (ISBN)
Description
The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language offers a comprehensive guide to the role that iconicity - resemblance between form and meaning - plays in all modes of languages, on all levels of language, and in all aspects of language. The originally semiotic notion of iconicity has gained widespread attention beyond the field of linguistics; this volume thus brings together research exploring a wide range of topics in iconicity from different perspectives. It explores the history of iconicity and its place in linguistic theory, in particular how the idea of iconicity has developed over time and how it has recently begun to once again influence thinking and theorizing about language. By presenting a very broad spectrum of iconicity, the chapters provide greater recognition of its influence and present a clearer picture of its scope across the languages of the world. They also offer a critical discussion of the notion of iconicity, as its parameters, dimensions, and operationalizations are not always easy to define. The volume will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions, but also to a wider audience outside linguistics proper, including researchers and students in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 251 mm
Width: 183 mm
Thickness: 58 mm
Weight
2020 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-284948-9 (9780192849489)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Olga Fischer is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (OUP 2007), co-author of A Brief History of English Syntax (CUP 2017), founder and co-editor of the Iconicity in Language and Literature series (Benjamins 1999-present), and chief editor of Folia Linguistica (2016-2023). She has edited volumes on grammaticalization and syntactic change (Benjamins 2000, 2004), and has published widely in these areas in academic journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Diachronica, Transactions of the Philological Society, and Studies in Language.
Kimi Akita is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Nagoya University. His research interests include ideophones, sound symbolism, and linguistic typology. He has published in major journals, including Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Journal of Linguistics. He is the co-editor of Iconicity: East Meets West (Benjamins 2015), The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition, and Translation (Routledge 2017), and Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives (Benjamins 2019).
Pamela Perniss is Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting (DGS-German) program at the University of Cologne. Her research takes a multimodal approach to language and focuses in particular on the role of iconicity in the visual modality in shaping language structure and processing. She has co-edited volumes and special issues related to the study of iconicity, including in the series Iconicity in Language and Literature (Benjamins 2020) and in Language and Cognition (CUP 2020). She is General Editor of Sign Language & Linguistics and Associate Editor of Cognitive Science.
Kimi Akita is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Nagoya University. His research interests include ideophones, sound symbolism, and linguistic typology. He has published in major journals, including Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Journal of Linguistics. He is the co-editor of Iconicity: East Meets West (Benjamins 2015), The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition, and Translation (Routledge 2017), and Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives (Benjamins 2019).
Pamela Perniss is Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting (DGS-German) program at the University of Cologne. Her research takes a multimodal approach to language and focuses in particular on the role of iconicity in the visual modality in shaping language structure and processing. She has co-edited volumes and special issues related to the study of iconicity, including in the series Iconicity in Language and Literature (Benjamins 2020) and in Language and Cognition (CUP 2020). She is General Editor of Sign Language & Linguistics and Associate Editor of Cognitive Science.
Volume editor
Professor Emerita of Germanic LinguisticsProfessor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics, University of Amsterdam
Associate Professor, School of HumanitiesAssociate Professor, School of Humanities, Nagoya University
Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting ProgramProfessor, Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting Program, University of Cologne
Content
1: Olga Fischer, Pamela Perniss, and Kimi Akita: Introduction: Iconicity as a general principle underlying language and language behavior
Part I. Foundational issues in iconicity
2: Luca Nobile: Iconicity in classical philosophy: A legacy of prehistoric orality
3: Winfried Noeth: Peirce on icons and iconicity
4: John E. Joseph: Saussure and iconicity: The ghost in the machine?
5: Hendrik De Smet: nalogy and iconicity
6: Sonia Cristofaro: Iconicity in language typology
7: Ludovic De Cuypere: The explanatory power of iconicity in language
8: Thomas Berg: Frequency, variation, and iconicity
Part II. Iconicity in linguistic theorizing
9: Diego Gabriel Krivochen and L'udmila Lackova Bennett: Iconicity and generative grammar
10: Elzbieta Muskat-Tabakowska: Iconicity in cognitive and functional linguistics
11: Bodo Winter, Greg Woodin, and Marcus Perlman: Defining iconicity for the cognitive sciences
12: Vincent M. Colapietro: Embodied mind
Part III. (Morpho)phonology
13: Marcus Perlman: Iconic prosody and its connection to iconic gesture
14: David M. Sidhu: Experimental approaches to sound symbolism
15: Niklas Erben Johansson: Cross-linguistic vocal iconicity
16: Iraide Ibarretxe-Antunano: The segmentals and suprasegmentals of ideophones
17: Oksana Tkachman: Iconicity in formational properties of signs in sign languages
Part IV. Iconicity in writing systems
18: Dimitrios Meletis: Phonographic writing systems
19: Xinxin Zhao: Logographic writing systems and Chinese characters
20: Sybille Kraemer: Notational iconicity
Part V. Morphosyntax
21: Wolfgang U. Dressler and Marianne Kilani-Schoch: Iconicity in word formation
22: Thomas Schwaiger: Reduplication in spoken and signed language
23: Livia Koertvelyessy: Iconicity in diminutives and augmentatives
24: Carl Boerstell: Iconic plurality across modalities
25: Isabeau De Smet and Freek Van de Velde: Iconicity in verbal formation
26: Klaas Willems: Principles of diagrammatic iconicity in language
27: Stela Manova: The iconicity of affix order
28: Anita Slonimska: Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages
Part VI. Lexis and semantics
29: Janis B. Nuckolls: The enactive iconicity of ideophone semantics
30: Anatoly Liberman: Etymology and folk etymology
31: Silva H. Ladewig: Degrees of iconicity in gestures: From richness to schematicity
32: Michal Szawerna and Neil Cohn: Iconicity in the visual lexicons of comics
Part VII. Discourse
33: James H.-Y. Tai: Iconic sequencing in spoken and signed language
34: Yanna Popova: Iconic and non-iconic aspects of storytelling: Narrative fiction, temporality, and memory
35: Lindsay Ferrara: Iconicity in signed narratives
Part VIII. Iconicity and language learning/ language development
36: Catherine Laing and Beyza Suemer: Iconic bootstrapping for language development: One size does not fit all
37: Gerardo Ortega, Yukari Hirata, and Spencer Kelly: Iconicity in L2 learning
38: Peter Bakker: Iconicity in pidgins and creoles
39: Lotte Meteyard: Effects of iconicity in populations with speech, language, and communication needs
Part IX. Iconicity and language processing
40: Robin L. Thompson and Corrine Occhino: Iconicity in sign language processing: Lexical effects in comprehension and production
41: Bonnie McLean and Yasamin Motamedi: A robustness approach to operationalizations of iconicity
42: Arash Aryani: Iconicity in the mind: Unravelling the cognitive and neural pathways linking sound and meaning
Part X. Iconicity and language evolution and emergence
43: Nicolas Fay and Bradley Walker: Sign iconicity and its contribution to gesture-first theories of language origin
44: Christine Cuskley and Kees Sommer: The evolution of linguistic iconicity and the cross-modal cognitive suite
45: Bencie Woll: Iconicity, multi-modality, and language evolution
46: Maria Flaksman: De-iconization and (re)-iconization: Diachronic aspects of lexical iconicity in spoken languages
47: William J. Herlofsky: De-iconization and re-iconization in signed languages: The case of Japanese sign language
48: Lois Dona and Marieke Schouwstra: Iconicity in the evolution of language: Computational models and laboratory experiments
49: Brian D. Joseph: Language contact and iconicity
Part XI. Applications of iconicity
50: Federico Gobbo: Iconicity in invented languages
51: Christina Ljungberg: Iconicity in literature
52: John Haiman: The aesthetic motivation of icons: 'We first love things when first we see them painted'
53: Imogen Cohen and Eric Metz: Translation of iconicity: Iconicity of translation
Part I. Foundational issues in iconicity
2: Luca Nobile: Iconicity in classical philosophy: A legacy of prehistoric orality
3: Winfried Noeth: Peirce on icons and iconicity
4: John E. Joseph: Saussure and iconicity: The ghost in the machine?
5: Hendrik De Smet: nalogy and iconicity
6: Sonia Cristofaro: Iconicity in language typology
7: Ludovic De Cuypere: The explanatory power of iconicity in language
8: Thomas Berg: Frequency, variation, and iconicity
Part II. Iconicity in linguistic theorizing
9: Diego Gabriel Krivochen and L'udmila Lackova Bennett: Iconicity and generative grammar
10: Elzbieta Muskat-Tabakowska: Iconicity in cognitive and functional linguistics
11: Bodo Winter, Greg Woodin, and Marcus Perlman: Defining iconicity for the cognitive sciences
12: Vincent M. Colapietro: Embodied mind
Part III. (Morpho)phonology
13: Marcus Perlman: Iconic prosody and its connection to iconic gesture
14: David M. Sidhu: Experimental approaches to sound symbolism
15: Niklas Erben Johansson: Cross-linguistic vocal iconicity
16: Iraide Ibarretxe-Antunano: The segmentals and suprasegmentals of ideophones
17: Oksana Tkachman: Iconicity in formational properties of signs in sign languages
Part IV. Iconicity in writing systems
18: Dimitrios Meletis: Phonographic writing systems
19: Xinxin Zhao: Logographic writing systems and Chinese characters
20: Sybille Kraemer: Notational iconicity
Part V. Morphosyntax
21: Wolfgang U. Dressler and Marianne Kilani-Schoch: Iconicity in word formation
22: Thomas Schwaiger: Reduplication in spoken and signed language
23: Livia Koertvelyessy: Iconicity in diminutives and augmentatives
24: Carl Boerstell: Iconic plurality across modalities
25: Isabeau De Smet and Freek Van de Velde: Iconicity in verbal formation
26: Klaas Willems: Principles of diagrammatic iconicity in language
27: Stela Manova: The iconicity of affix order
28: Anita Slonimska: Iconicity in simultaneous constructions in sign languages
Part VI. Lexis and semantics
29: Janis B. Nuckolls: The enactive iconicity of ideophone semantics
30: Anatoly Liberman: Etymology and folk etymology
31: Silva H. Ladewig: Degrees of iconicity in gestures: From richness to schematicity
32: Michal Szawerna and Neil Cohn: Iconicity in the visual lexicons of comics
Part VII. Discourse
33: James H.-Y. Tai: Iconic sequencing in spoken and signed language
34: Yanna Popova: Iconic and non-iconic aspects of storytelling: Narrative fiction, temporality, and memory
35: Lindsay Ferrara: Iconicity in signed narratives
Part VIII. Iconicity and language learning/ language development
36: Catherine Laing and Beyza Suemer: Iconic bootstrapping for language development: One size does not fit all
37: Gerardo Ortega, Yukari Hirata, and Spencer Kelly: Iconicity in L2 learning
38: Peter Bakker: Iconicity in pidgins and creoles
39: Lotte Meteyard: Effects of iconicity in populations with speech, language, and communication needs
Part IX. Iconicity and language processing
40: Robin L. Thompson and Corrine Occhino: Iconicity in sign language processing: Lexical effects in comprehension and production
41: Bonnie McLean and Yasamin Motamedi: A robustness approach to operationalizations of iconicity
42: Arash Aryani: Iconicity in the mind: Unravelling the cognitive and neural pathways linking sound and meaning
Part X. Iconicity and language evolution and emergence
43: Nicolas Fay and Bradley Walker: Sign iconicity and its contribution to gesture-first theories of language origin
44: Christine Cuskley and Kees Sommer: The evolution of linguistic iconicity and the cross-modal cognitive suite
45: Bencie Woll: Iconicity, multi-modality, and language evolution
46: Maria Flaksman: De-iconization and (re)-iconization: Diachronic aspects of lexical iconicity in spoken languages
47: William J. Herlofsky: De-iconization and re-iconization in signed languages: The case of Japanese sign language
48: Lois Dona and Marieke Schouwstra: Iconicity in the evolution of language: Computational models and laboratory experiments
49: Brian D. Joseph: Language contact and iconicity
Part XI. Applications of iconicity
50: Federico Gobbo: Iconicity in invented languages
51: Christina Ljungberg: Iconicity in literature
52: John Haiman: The aesthetic motivation of icons: 'We first love things when first we see them painted'
53: Imogen Cohen and Eric Metz: Translation of iconicity: Iconicity of translation