Abstract
Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behavior in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analyzing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra-conserved words and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins.
Highlights
When asked to produce a novel sign to refer to an object or action, participants tend to use a form for the sign that resembles one or more aspects of its meaning (Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010)
In this paper we investigate whether there is direct evidence for iconicity in natural language evolution, by analysing a diachronic corpus of vocabulary forms, determining the extent to which iconicity relates to language stability and change
In previous studies with larger sets of words, iconicity has been shown to relate to concreteness, with more iconic words being more concrete (Winter et al, 2017), and to age of acquisition, with more iconic words tending to be acquired earlier (Perry et al, 2015). These direct relations were not found in the current set of words, nor for the subset of nouns in the current data set, where iconicity related only to frequency
Summary
When asked to produce a novel sign to refer to an object or action, participants tend to use a form for the sign that resembles one or more aspects of its meaning (Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010). This resemblance, or “iconicity” (Dingemanse et al 2015), between communicative symbol and meaning has been found in a range of behavioural tasks. A prime example is onomatopoeia, where words for animal calls, for instance, reflect the auditory properties of the animal’s sound. Iconicity extends well beyond the boundaries of onomatopoeia, and has been proposed to widely suffuse the vocabulary (Dingemanse, 2012; Dingemanse et al, 2015; Perry et al, 2015; Winter et al, 2017)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
