Iconicity in syntax and the architecture of linguistic theory

Bibliographic Data

ID20380865
AuthorsDiego Gabriel Krivochen (0000-0001-6145-1057, University of Reading), Ľudmila Lacková (0000-0001-9852-4280, Palacký University)
Year2020
Volume44
Issue1
Pages95-131
Publication date2020-05-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0378-4177 • E-ISSN: 1569-9978
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/sl.19017.lac
OpenAlexW3022224165
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited53

Linguistic iconicity has been studied since ancient times (e.g., Plato’s Cratylus , see Cooper & Hutchinson 1997 ). Within modern grammatical description, this notion was mostly developed by Jakobson and Benveniste; nowadays, iconicity in language is even being experimentally tested (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016 ; Diatka & Milička 2017 ). However, most studies on linguistic iconicity pertain to prosody, sound symbolism, or morphology; syntactic iconicity has been vastly underexplored. In this paper, we present two hypotheses concerning syntactic iconicity : (1) syntactic descriptions of natural language strings have an inherent structure which is isomorphic to that of representations in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system; or (2) linear order imposed on phrase structure is isomorphic to that in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system. We will argue in favour of the former, which constitutes a novel perspective on iconicity in grammar. We furthermore discuss the place that iconicity may have in the architecture of a generative system

Generative grammar · Grammar · Iconicity · Linguistics · Prosody · Syntax · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy