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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts Iconicity and Metaphor in Sarah Taub Department of ASL, Linguistics, and Interpretation This talk will focus on two phenomena, iconicity and conceptual metaphor, that both draw on structure-preserving correspondences between two mental structures ("conceptual mappings"); in particular, we will address how these mapping-based phenomena manifest in American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the American Deaf community. We will see that these phenomena present a challenge for linguistic theories that rely on a strict separation of form components and meaning components (i.e., autonomous phonology, syntax, and semantics). Iconicity is a resemblance between a linguistic form and its meaning. Contrary to popular belief, iconicity is common in the languages of the world, and occurs at all levels of linguistic structure (e.g., syntax and morphology as well as lexicon); iconic linguistic items fit the phonotactic constraints of their languages. We feel that iconic items resemble what they mean because there is a structure-preserving mapping between their form and a mental image related to their meaning. Conceptual metaphor also involves a structure-preserving mapping, this time between a concrete domain of thought and an abstract domain of thought. For example, the English sentences We were tossing ideas back and forth and That went right over my head draw on a single, consistent mapping between the concrete domain of tossing objects back and forth and the abstract domain of communicating ideas. In ASL, metaphor and iconicity often occur in combination. ASL, like all signed languages, has an especially large array of iconic linguistic items for the description of concrete shapes, locations, and movements. These items are frequently used metaphorically as well to describe or name abstract referents. Thus, for example, the ASL sign meaning I inform you is essentially an iconic description of an object being removed from the signer's head and tossed toward the addressee. This talk will present a number of metaphorical/iconic conceptual mappings from ASL, showing the structure-preserving correspondences between iconic form and concrete mental image, and between concrete mental image and abstract concept. We will see how some signs incorporate two, three, or more metaphorical/iconic mappings. The final point to be addressed is the implication of these results for linguistic theory. Some linguistic theories ("formalist" theories) treat language as an autonomous system, separate from other parts of human cognition; they also divide up the language capacity into several autonomous components. Iconicity, based as it is on conceptual mappings between form (phonology, syntax, etc.) and meaning (semantics), is a problem for these theories. The presence of iconicity in spoken and signed languages at all levels of structure is a strong argument for linguistic theories ("cognitivist"theories) that treat form and meaning in an integrated fashion.
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