Version 4.2

Lecture: Are certain sign-to-signifier mappings pervasive cross-linguistically? Putting one iconicity hypothesis to the test (in thirteen unrelated languages)

Are sign and signifier fully independent in natural language? Can iconic (that is, non-arbitrary) mappings be found between features and across languages? Are specific kinds of mappings pervasive? Recently, some hypotheses have been formulated about the driving factor behind allegedly iconic mappings between specific classes of phones and lexical-semantic features present in common words. Data from extensive corpus studies of English was interpreted to show that fricative phonemes tended to be more present in atelic verbs and mass nouns, whereas stops appeared more frequently in telic verbs and count nouns. The intuition behind was that the phono-acoustic traits (and their cognitive representation) could be modulating iconic mappings between consonant class of phonemes and the lexical-semantic property of the lexemes in which those phonemes appeared, such that, within obstruents, the continuity and occlusive traits would map to “continuous/diffuse” or “defined/sharp” referred movements and object boundaries, respectively. The idea, in short, appeals to cognitive motivations predicted to be pervasive in the evolution of language, suggesting that retention of those posited iconic mappings should be significant cross-linguistically.
My proposal for this talk is presenting a project in which I tried to address this pilot study and its underlying methodology, suggesting a protocol for testing the presence of the effect in a set of common words of these classes in a hopefully sufficiently representative sample of 13 language varieties (Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Lebanese Arabic, Wolof, Mandarin, Tamil, Khmer, Nahuatl, Quechua, Guarani, Mapundungun and Basque). I shall present a few ongoing results and offer a brief discussion about both the epistemological problems that appear in this type of research and the theories in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics pertaining to iconicity studies.

Info

Day: 2019-05-24
Start time: 17:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: 103/ H80
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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