Talk:Iconicity

Hi, I'm in the same class. I added the section on gesture calls and will add one more component to this article. I hope you like what my brain smarts done make.--MartinEvergreen (talk) 04:06, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Mistake in quote
"Chimpanzees in the wild do not point, and rarely do so in captivity, however there is a documented case of one named Kanzi, described by Savage-Rumbaugh et al..." I am unsure whether the run-on sentence is part of the quote or not, so I am reluctant to fix it. Quinnov (talk) 02:15, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi, I'm in a linguistics course at The Evergreen State College. As the final project for this course, our reading group is responsible for editing a relevant wikipedia article. We are hoping to add some information to the page on the topic of the proposed role of iconicity in the evolution of language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adakat16 (talk • contribs) 04:16, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I am studying cognitive linguistics in Tokyo - need some tips!

Nothing here about imagic or diagrammatic iconicity, Peirce, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.234.75.171 (talk) 08:55, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi I'm gonna try and add this for a class does anyone have any objections?

Use of Iconicity to help teach foreign Languages

It has been suggested that iconicity can be used in the teaching of languages. There are two ways this has been suggested. The first being “Horizontal-Iconicity” and the second being vowel to magnitude relationships. Horizontal-Iconicity is the phenomenon of opposition of meaning and spelling. For example, in Egyptian mer, which means right hand and rem, which means left hand. Vowel magnitude relationships suggest that the larger the object the more likely it is to have open vowel sounds in it’s name, Ah, Eh, Oh, and the smaller the object the more likely it is to have a closed vowel sound, ee, i, a. Open vowel sounds are also more likely to be associated with round shapes and dark or gloomy moods, where closed vowel sounds are more likely to be associated with pointed shapes and happy moods. Because people are more likely to remember things they have more Mnemonic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic) tags for, it is suggested that it may be helpful to point these things out in the teaching of language.

bibliograpgy: Croft, L. B. 1978. The Mnemonic Use of Linguistic Iconicity in Teaching Language and Literature. The Slavic and East European Journal, 22(4), 509-518.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.58.184 (talk) 00:52, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Someone should add a linguistic economy page, as it is the other main principle of functionalism. I, unfortunately, do not know enough about the topic to make a good page. TheNyleve (talk) 05:41, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

"Current research on sign language phonology acknowledges that certain aspects are semantically motivated." I noticed this section references research but doesn't appear to properly cite it. I think this section could improve with further examples of signs with high ratings of iconicity and low ratings of iconicity. Especially since signed languages are visual, diagrams would be very helpful in understanding this topic.Zmsc42 (talk) 19:44, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Sign languages
The section on sign languages states: "Further, the ability to modify sign meaning through phonological changes to signs is gaining attention. The ability to work creatively with sign language in this way has been associated with accomplished, or native signers." I have never heard about what is stated in the second sentence. Does anyone have a source? Falott (talk) 13:57, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Section moved from article
I'm moving the section below to talk, for the time being. Zero references, plenty of redlinks, and the tone is too unencyclopedically promotional for my liking. As for the subject matter itself, it does sound vaguely relevant - so vaguely that it doesn't provide significant added value, though. Best-case scenario, someone will take a stab at salvaging something at some point?

- 2A02:560:42A9:6900:E488:6BAE:AC3B:DCFC (talk) 22:22, 31 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Digital media


 * Over a seven-year span, Marc Davis, Brian Williams, and Golan Levin have managed to develop their own iconic visual language. The creation of their program called Media Streams was derived from a need and a desire to have a universal language when creating videos. Media accessibility is becoming easier to obtain by the day, and with this growth new development in the field is bound to happen.


 * Media production was once limited to an elite group of individuals who spent a large portion of their time taking courses and specializing in the art. Now with the technological advancements and internet use of today, much of the skill can be learned out of your own home. As Marc Davis would say, just as the printing press was given to the users via Desktop Publishing, media production can now, also, be given to these same users. Streaming media is vastly growing and the manipulation and reconstruction of this hot trend is more than needed and necessary to keep the diversity coming.


 * From 1991 to 1997, Marc Davis and his colleagues worked out of the Machine Understanding Group of the MIT Laboratory and the Interval Research Corporation to create their media streams program.


 * Media Streams "[i]s a system for annotating, retrieving, repurposing, and automatically assembling digital video". (Davis; Media Streams) The system uses a stream based, semantic representation of video content with an iconic visual language interface of hierarchically structured and searchable primitives.


 * The goal of this system is to address the problems of annotation convergence and human-computer communication. Developing the iconic visual language was necessary to assist the computational reading and writing of representational consensual interpretations of video content in a standardized way. Illiterate, diverse languages and the like will all be able to work with this system due to its universal language.

I see no secondary sources (or... any sources) to establish notability and the writing style is very unencyclopedic. Salvaging this would require a full rewrite. As it stands I zero reason to mention it. But then again, I really don't know what this is even talking about; it'll be up to the person re-adding this to prove its notability and explain what it is. --Megaman en m (talk) 22:56, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Paragraph on iconicity not being prediction nor excluding arbitrariness
Deleted paragraph: I don't care particularly about my paragraph being deleted ―― in fact I don't see what the text of it was anywhere. I think, however, that the issue should be addressed of what place iconicity is assigned in language. The structuralist notion of "arbitrariness", with which the article contrasts iconicity, is often assumed or claimed (by those of the structuralist or other persuasions that think linguistics is not scientific if it does not make absolute predictions) to exclude things like iconicity, which only give partial explanations, which only express tendencies or motivations rather than true causes. For many of us who use the concept of iconicity it is indeed understood to be a motivation for some things, but not an absolute cause of everything under discussion. There is plenty of arbitrariness in the lexicon, for instance, and even cases that we would point to as iconically motivated are not at all predicted absolutely by that motivation. (Fwiw I have been involved in Cognitive Linguistics since the late 1970's.) Lavintzin (talk) 18:07, 30 May 2024 (UTC)


 * I think I'll try another paragraph and see if remsense or whoever likes it better. Lavintzin (talk) 15:15, 31 May 2024 (UTC)