Iconicity Presentation

Background: Speech community -> Community of practice
Define CoP…
Bucholtz: (a) Its tendency to take language as central. (b) Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community. (c) Its preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins. (d) Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals. (e) Its view of identity as a set of static categories. (f ) Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own un- derstandings of their practices.
This turns out to be important in considering iconicity in interaction with technological interfaces.
Background: Rhematization is iconicity in modes of speech
Irvine and Gal, 2008, etc.
What is nerd talk?
Bucholtz Elsewhere (Bucholtz 1998) I describe the social identity of the nerd and detail the phonological, syntactic, lexical, and discourse practices through which nerd identity is linguistically indexed.
What does it index?
HCI findings on how people talk to computers.
Suchman: Computers designed on the basis that plans determine practices, rather than emerging from them.
What does the iconicity accomplish?
We could consider speech as a special case of semiotics (Galantucci, 2009): For example, spontaneously emerging novel sign-languages have deep and vast iconic roots (Fusellier-Souza, 2006) and, although iconicity in sign-languages tends to decrease over time (Frishberg, 1975), a fairly high degree of iconicity remains one of the defining features of historically established sign-languages (Taub, 2001). Granted, spoken languages do exhibit some iconicity (Haiman, 1985; Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994), but their degree of iconicity is minimal when compared to that of sign-languages. Research in experimental semiotics not only confirms that iconicity is an important feature of emerging human communication systems but it also explains why communication systems tend to retain part of their iconic roots (Fay, Garrod, & Roberts, 2008; see next section). Thus, the fact that iconicity plays a marginal role in spoken communication might be a by-product of adaptations specific to the acoustic medium, rather than a central design feature of human communication (Hockett, 1960).

Questions:

What kind of iconicity is this? What is the significance of computation here, where the interpretive process itself has been embedded in a system?

semiotic ideologies?

REFERENCES

Galantucci, B. (2009). Experimental semiotics: A new approach for studying communication as a form of joint action. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 393-410.