Iconicity as the bridge between words and the world

This is the latest Language at Leeds Distinguished Speaker Talk, by Professor Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London).

Abstract   I will start engaging the audience into a thought experiment: “What if the study of language started from signed, rather than spoken, languages?”. I will argue that if we started from signed languages we would have first studied language as multimodal, rather than reducing it to speech and/or text; moreover, we would have taken iconicity to be, along with arbitrariness, a foundational property of language. Taking a multimodal perspective, iconicity is ubiquitous in the phonology (of both spoken and signed languages), prosody (of both spoken and signed languages) and co-speech gestures (n spoken languages). I have argued that while arbitrariness would ensure that speakers can discriminate among different words; iconicity would ensure that language brings to the mind’s eye properties of referents. I will then present evidence from both signed and spoken languages, for a role of iconicity in language processing and language development and speculations for a role of iconicity in language evolution.