Seminar in Iconicity

Seminar in Iconicity A focus on sound symbolism in variation

iconicity and indexicality

2 major forms of iconicity imagic

diagrammatic

Haiman, the iconicity of grammar

Saussure // synchronic linguisitcs Pierce Form

Meaning

Interpretant [construal] -> gives rise to a new sign

We can’t talk about the enregisterment of a sign unless we have a notion of the sign as dynamic.

Pierce, 3 kinds of signs: symbol/convention some convention, habit, social rule that

icon (resemblance) qualitative features

index: connected by context

Kinds of interprents immediate

dynamic

final

Idea: How does construal/enregisterment depend on technology? (The spread of dictionaries & the internet computational image of interpretation)

Social indexicality: Any sign that points to, and helps create, a social state of affairs. (When we talk about indexicality we are really thinking about style)

Variables as indexical signs. At times as rhemes. As part of a larger performative system

Silverstein: higher-order index

Chris Potts: Expressives Every characteristic of an expressive is also true of a sociolinguistic variable. [ Labov: Different ways of saying the same thing, no change in reference.]

A continuum of interiority

Frequency code // John Ohala

WEEK 2

I am interested in the role iconicity plays in social indexicality, language ideologies.

Nuckolls (p. 228) suggests sound symbolism is potentially a bridge between linguistic anthropologists and more biologically-oriented linguists. Yes?

Could it be that magnitude sound symbolism is actually indexical; that higher sounds are more often seen coming from smaller creatures (children, women, small animals) and lower sounds from larger creatures?

Have people done large-scale analysis of sound symbolism by predicting word vectors from phonemes? Which n-phoneme-combinations are most predictive?

Kita (1997) postulates a two-dimensional semantic framework consisting of an affececto-imagistic dimension for ideophonic meaning and an analytic dimen- sion for non-ideophonic meaning. His argument draws from experimental evi- dence demonstrating an overwhelming correlation between ideophones and gesture (Kita 1993). Subjects asked to watch a cartoon were videotaped retelling the events in Japan

Variation studies have used correlations to determine the role of linguistic variables in social practice. Sociolinguistic variables are seen as passive “markers” of the speaker’s place in the social grid (particularly in the socioeconomic hierarchy). Correlation of a linguistic variable (or a certain frequency of its use) with a demographic category gives a rudimentary social meaning to that variable within the community: The variable “means” membership in the demographic group correlated with its use. Speakers are seen as making strategic use of sociolinguistic markers in order to affirm membership in their own social group, or to claim membership in other groups to which

What I want to study: the relationship between iconicity and ideology. People want to make iconicity ‘natural' Rheme: an index that has been construed as iconic. Irvin and Gal…

Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2009). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 402-434.

Iconicity, ideophone loss as people want to feel not-natural. How does this tie into gender, power?

Abstraction: white men are good at abstraction…

iconization, fractal recursivity, erasure

58: the politics of presumed dialectic iconicity: delicacy, purity

This article is This iconicity is of a different category from what we have previously discussed in class: it is at the scale of dialect rather than word.

Erasure is the process by which people or linguistic features are made invisible. I have heard erasure used differently, to speak of the process by which ideology makes itself invisible by becoming hegemonic and asserting its naturalness or obviousness.

Suggested implications:

Contact (colonialism)
Ethnicity
Nature of language

Follow Silverstein, Print Capitalism ->

Metaphor, Black, 1954 Metaphors create similarity

The interaction view of metaphor: an observation (assertion) that two ideas co-occur. The “system of associated commonplaces”: metaphors expose the ideologies Lovely image of looking through a scratched screen (through a glass darkly!)

The interaction view of metaphor is perhaps like the fact that we have an interpretive screen on the world. How can we talk about pure iconicity when the referent of the symbol is also an interpreted meaning?

Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs

Susan Gal, 2013

this article connects the black, metaphor article, to iconicity.

“In Peirce’s usage, qualities (Firsts) are ‘abstract potentialities’ that can be experienced only when embodied in material occurrences and objects (Seconds). Real-time instanti- ations of abstract qualities are necessarily shaped by conventions (Thirds), that is, by cultural categories.”

This gets right at the points above.

“In addition, conventionalized qualities (qualia) can be displayed and made palpable in the poetics of interaction even if they are not labeled nor widely discussed.” —> a point made implicitly in the article on metaphor as well

standard languages, geographical and social dialects, ritual and political registers, accents and styles —> all forms of register

Combinations of signs, linguistic and otherwise, are unified by a metasign (e.g. a metapragmatic label) and function as a register when their distinction from other such combin- ations is typified and recognized by a population of language users as indexical of particular categories of space, time, and personae, along with their imputed characterological attributes (Agha 2007). Registers are reflexive models that are invoked in interaction, so that social types are not only performed but also troped upon, via creative indexes, in real-time speech activity (Silverstein 2003).

THIS IS BIG FOR ME.

Judith T. Irvine and I have emphasized that similarities (iconic relations) are construed in the context of differentiations.

—> So we study variation to understand the differentiations that are made (or that we make!), which are the grounds for possible recognition of similarity; this similarity is the basis of iconicity. Run it backwards, though, because it’s all reflexive. Claims of iconicity surface/assert forms of similarity (just as claims of metaphor presume upon “systems of associated commonplaces”), which can then bring about recognition of difference. And we can use that difference toward political ends.

I wonder if we can follow this progression in Trump and le Pen. I would argue that Trump self-consciously employs the register of superficial, ignorant businessman, and furthermore encourages his audience to read the flavor of his speech iconically, as showing his true self to be ignorant, knee-jerk, un-self-conscious, unaware of how he comes across. This iconicity depends on difference; most importantly between being obviously, unproblematically American, and being Other. And that difference has gotten him a lot of political mileage.

(34) Put another way: It takes an active ideological, hence semiotic, process to create a similarity, and the necessary concomitant of similarity: differentiation. Judith T. Irvine and I have emphasized that similarities (iconic relations) are construed in the context of differentiations. Registers are the products of contrast, of differentiation. Two (or more) sets of personae (and times, places, events), each indexed by a linguistic form, are perceived as parallel indexicalities. Two or more such indexi- calities are similar in that they have the same relations among their parts. They constitute a diagrammatic icon. As Irvine and I have argued, in construing diagrammatic icons, a semiotic process characteristic of language ideologies makes ‘linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them. . . picking out qualities supposedly shared by the social image and the linguistic image’ (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37). We have dubbed this process rhematization (Gal 2005), drawing on the second set of Peircean distinctions mentioned earlier, in which a rheme is ‘a Sign which, for its interpretant, is a Sign of qualitative possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such a kind of possible Object’ (Peirce 1940: 103). Parmentier clarifies: ‘rhemes are signs whose interpretants represent them as being icons’ (1994: 17). In short, the relation of sign and object is taken to be not (only) indexical but (also) a similarity. The concept of rhematization captures the way registers that are taken up as indexes of social personae from one ideological perspective can also be construed as icons, or can be construed as icons in another ideological frame.

Observers can document how participants learn what aspect of practices instantiate or embody the same quality in diverse media.

—> This goes to my point about the flavors of candy last week.

Susan Gal’s accounts of her fieldwork (p. 39) helps me imagine my own upcoming fieldwork.

Scholars of linguistic variation have been notably successful in showing how regis- ters are created when language ideologies construct indexical sign relations linking typified linguistic forms to typical personae. (44)

Week 6

sound poetry

Enregisterment: A possibility for the appearance of sound symbolism: drawing on other languages

The sound symbolism book does not engage with meaning.

denotation: the reference.

Bollinger is about picking up new meanings

Is anything really iconic?