Three paradigms of iconicity research in language and literature

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Three Paradigms of Iconicity Research in Language and Literature Winfried Nöth (São Paulo) The paper distinguishes three paradigms of iconicity research in linguistic and literary studies. The first is the classical paradigm. It aims at the discovery of Form[s] Miming Meaning (Nänny & Fischer 1999). The studies within this paradigm are concerned with forms of spoken and written language representing nonverbal phenomena to which they are in some respect similar. Research within this paradigm began with the study of sound symbolism, but it soon advanced to incorporate Peirce’s three forms of iconicity, images, diagrams and metaphors. While iconicity was first thought to be an exception to the rule that language structure is essentially arbitrary, the extension of research from verbal images to diagrams and metaphors soon brought evidence that iconicity is much more wide-spread than previous dogmas of linguistics had postulated. While the first paradigm of iconicity research inquires into relations between verbal forms and phenomena of the nonverbal world of qualities, things, and events, the second paradigm inquires into verbal forms which echo verbal forms. In iconicity of this kind, language is not similar to phenomena of the nonverbal world but to itself. Instead of similarities between words and phenomena of the nonverbal world, we are faced with self-similarities: verbal signs are icons of verbal signs. This is the paradigm of self-reflexivity in language and literature. Among its topics are forms of repetition, recurrence, parallelism, rhyme, meter, and more generally, symmetry in language and literature. The third paradigm deals with the mental images which verbal symbols evoke in the process of their interpretation. It deals with the most fundamental and at the same time ubiquitous iconic ingredients of language. The predicates of propositions are a locus of icons in this sense, whereas the propositional subjects function as indices. The sentence This chair is yellow is a symbol which incorporates an index in its subject (‘this chair’) and an icon in its predicate (‘is yellow’). In order to understand the proposition, says Peirce, we need to evoke the mental image of “a whole lot of yellow things” which we have seen, synthesize them mentally in the form of a “composite photograph”, and attribute the particular quality of color to the particular chair. Iconicity is involved insofar as qualities are compared and the conclusion is made that they are similar. Peirce describes the iconic judgment involved in this process as follows: “Take any yellow thing you like and you will find, on comparing it with this chair, that they agree pretty well in color” (CP 7.632). Research within the third paradigm has only begun recently. Peirce emphasized its fundamental relevance to the semiotics of language in 1908, when he observed that icons are necessary in order to “explain the significations of words” and that they “chiefly illustrate the signification of predicate-thoughts”, whereas indices are needed to understand “the denotations of subject-thoughts” (CP 6.338). These insights are of great relevance to the topic of the role of mental images in cognition so hotly debated in the cognitive sciences.

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