Abstract
This paper is devoted to the study of autistic speech from the perspective of iconicity. Language is a major means of human I-not-I interaction and communication. When there is affinity between content and the form designating it, this form (linguistic units and their organization) is said to be iconic to that content. Looking at the various modes of linguistic iconicity (from the phonetic level to the entire discourse, and from identity and continuity to modes of resemblance and analogy), milestone autistic denominators are detailed and analyzed as they occur in an authentic diary written over three years by a woman with autism. This article offers a look at echolalia; pronoun management; perception of affinity as exemplified in the use of kinship terms; content words vs. grammar markers, neologisms and other phenomena. These findings are then integrated to show that mutism is the most authentic – and iconic – mode enacting the traumatic autistic rupture of the delusory symbiotic state. In this premature frail encapsulation the counter-iconic use of language is in itself a pseudo use. By treating both language (phones, words, idioms, discourse, etc.) and people as things, the verbal oddities of autistic speakers authentically iconize the inauthentic inanimate stance.
Highlights
Iconicity is a quality of affinity between content and the form designating it
Semiotics, following Charles Peirce (1965) classifies signs into three cardinal categories: firstness: identity; secondness: resemblance and thirdness: analogy mediated by convention
We investigate the semiotic relations holding between the autistic states and the selected typical linguistic behaviors emerging in autistic speech: our first sub-section focuses on echolalia; we focus on similarity and conclude looking at analogy
Summary
Iconicity is a quality of affinity between content and the form designating it. Semiotics, following Charles Peirce (1965) classifies signs into three cardinal categories: firstness: identity (pure icon); secondness: resemblance (index) and thirdness: analogy mediated by convention (symbol). 9), the term ‘autism’ covers “a specific spectrum of disorders in which there is an absence of human relationships and gross impoverishment of mental and emotional life”. These impairments, she argues, result from “the blocking of awareness by an early aberrant development of autistic procedures”. Considering the various modes of linguistic iconicity (from the phonetic level to the entire discourse, and from identity to different modes of resemblance and analogy: secondness and thirdness) the emergence of autistic etiology in autistic speech is outlined. Pragmatics viewed, following Kasher and Meilijson, “as the linguistic conditions of appropriate use of sentences in context”, these oddities seen from the autistic ruptured context turn out to be not only the most appropriate but iconically imaging that state
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