Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature

Front Cover
Max Nänny, Olga Fischer
John Benjamins Publishing, 1999 - 443 pages
The recent past has seen an increasing interest in iconicity especially among linguists. This collection puts the interdisciplinary study of iconic dimensions (comprising what has been termed 'imagic iconicity', as well as 'diagrammatic iconicity', i.e. iconicity of a more abstract and less semiotic type) on the map, paying special attention to the use of iconicity in literary texts. The studies presented here explore iconicity from two different angles. A first group of authors brings into focus how far the primary code, the code of grammar is influenced by iconic motivation (with contributions on rules involved in discourse; rules in word formation; and phonological rules), and how originally iconic models have become conventionalized. Others go one step further in exploring how, for instance, the presence of iconicity can tell us more about the structure of human cognition, or how the iconicist desire for symmetry can be related to the symmetry of the human body. A second group of contributors is more interested in the presence of iconicity as part of the secondary code, i.e. in how speakers and writers remotivate or play with the primary code; how they concretise what has become conventional or how they use form to add to meaning in literary texts, commercial language and in the new electronic use of texts.

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Contents

Why Iconicity?
3
The Sublimation Trajectory
37
A New Theory of Love
59
Forms of Creative Interaction Between
83
Eighteenth and NineteenthCentury Prose
109
What if Anything is Phonological Iconicity?
123
Semiotic Functions
155
Alphabetic Letters as Icons in Literary Texts
173
A Typology
251
An Opportunity to Create a Personal
285
Diagrammatic Iconicity in WordFormation
307
Iconicity in Brand Names
325
On the Role Played by Iconicity in Grammaticalisation Processes
345
Iconicity Typology and Cognition
375
The Iconic Use of Syntax in British and American Fiction
393
Iconicity as
409

Being and Nothing in the Visual Poetry of E
199
George Herberts Coloss 3 3
215
Iconic Rendering of Motion and Process in the Poetry of William
235

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