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Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language

  • Bodo Winter EMAIL logo and Marcus Perlman
Published/Copyright: June 18, 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper reviews recent research using participant ratings to measure the iconicity (form-meaning resemblance) of words and signs. This method, by enabling wide coverage of lexical items and cross-linguistic comparison, has revealed systematic patterns in how iconicity is distributed across the vocabularies of different languages. These findings are consistent with established linguistic and psychological theory on iconicity, and they connect iconicity to factors like learning and acquisition, semantics, pragmatic aspects of language like playfulness, and to the semantic neighborhood density of words and signs. After taking stock of this research, we look critically at the construct validity of iconicity ratings, considering an alternative account of iconicity ratings recently put forward by Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do. 2020a. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6. 20190088. They propose that, for most vocabulary, participants might rate the iconicity of different words based on their meaning alone – specifically the degree to which it relates to the senses – independently of actual form-meaning resemblance. We argue that their hypothesis cannot account for many of the various, theory-driven results from this line of research, which strongly support the conclusion that the ratings really do measure iconicity.

Keywords: expressives; ideophones; mimetics; onomatopoeia; sound symbolism
Corresponding author: Bodo Winter, Department of English Language & Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, E-mail:

Funding source: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship

Award Identifier / Grant number: MR/T040505/1

Acknowledgment

Dr. Bodo Winter was supported by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship MR/T040505/1.

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Received: 2020-12-07
Accepted: 2021-03-22
Published Online: 2021-06-18

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0135
Keywords for this article
expressives; ideophones; mimetics; onomatopoeia; sound symbolism

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
  6. Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
  7. The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
  12. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
  13. Semantics & Pragmatics
  14. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Current trends in grammar writing
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
  19. Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
  20. Language Acquisition and Language Learning
  21. Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
  22. Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
  23. Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
  24. “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
  25. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
  26. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
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  29. The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
  30. In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
  31. Cognitive Linguistics
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  33. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  34. Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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