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The way people order signs in non-verbal event representations of events has been a topic of extensive research in recent decades, with conflicting findings. Based on a literature review, we distinguish the following factors that have been argued to influence sign order: (a) diagrammatic iconicity, (b) manipulation vs. construction events, (c) reversibility, (d) most common word order of L1, (e) the semiotic system (gesture, depiction) used, and (f) a putative “natural” Agent–Patient–Act order. To test the role of these factors, we conducted a study where Swedish participants observed events that varied with respect to reversibility and construction/manipulation status, and then had to communicate them to an addressee using gestures for half the stimuli. For the other half, they used sequences of simple drawings of the event participants and the action. The results showed the huge influence of the semiotic system (e) on sign order. There was a role of reversibility (c) only when gestures were used, while L1 word order (d) only had an effect when sequences of pictures were used. The “ontological status” of the Patient (b) was shown to affect the representations in both semiotic systems but was much stronger for gestures. Even the two most general factors (a) and (f) where shown to be sensitive to the type of semiotic system. Future studies of how such cognitive and semiotic determinants interact are needed to fully understand the phenomenon of sign order preference.

Following the levels of intentionality and semiosis distinguished by the Semiotic Hierarchy (a layered model of semiosis/intentionality), and the distinction between original agency (without the use of artefacts) and enhanced agency (the prosthetic incorporation of artefacts), we propose a model of an agency hierarchy, consisting of six layers. Consistent with the phenomenological orientation of cognitive semiotics, a central claim is that agency and subjectivity are complementary aspects of intentionality. Hence, there is no agency without at least the minimal sense/feeling of agency. This perspective rules out all artefacts as genuine agents, as well as simple organisms, since it is highly unlikely that e.g. bacteria have any first-person perspective. Using this model, we review and assess recent proposals on the nature of agency from cognitive science, and neuroscience, and draw conclusions on how to incorporate aspects of them within a synthetic cognitive-semiotic framework.

Linguistic relativity is a notion that has been met with both praise and scorn. We argue that there is correlation between theorists’ general conceptions of the nature of language, and their stance toward linguistic relativity. Starting with the proponents of the thesis, we distinguish between the relativists of the early days (Boas, Whorf) and modern neo-Whofians (Levinson, Slobin), showing that the first but not the latter are committed to a view of language as a monolithic semiotic system contrasting “arbitrarily” with other such systems. Critics of the thesis also come from two diametrically opposed views of language. While universalists see the most significant part of language as pan-human cognitive structure (insulated from thought in general), socio-cultural theorists emphasize the nature of language as contextually situated activity. In both cases the potential for locally sedimented linguistic structures to influence thought is excluded or at best marginalized. In response, we propose that a synthetic ontology of language as an experientially grounded semiotic system for meaning making in actual social contexts allows for the possibility for language to influence thought, though in different ways. These depend on whether we consider language as situated use, as sedimented conventions or as ultimately prelinguistic motivations for “universal” properties like predication. We argue that all three of these perspectives need to be considered. With the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model, which is based on such a linguistic ontology, and inspired by the integral linguistics and phenomenology, we show how the deadlock in the debate over linguistic relativity can be resolved, and the possibility for discussion to proceed in less antagonistic manner.

We propose reframing one of the key questions in the field of language evolution as what was the original human-specific communicative system? With the help of cognitive semiotics, first we clarify the difference between signals, which characterize animal communication, and signs, which do not replace but complement signals in human communication. We claim that the evolution of bodily mimesis allowed for the use of signs, and the social-cognitive skills needed to support them to emerge in hominin evolution. Neither signs nor signals operate single-handedly, but as part of semiotic systems. Communicative systems can be either monosemiotic or polysemiotic—the former consisting of a single semiotic system and the latter, of several. Our proposal is that pantomime, as the original human-specific communicative system, should be characterized as polysemiotic: dominated by gesture but also including vocalization, facial expression, and possibly the rudiments of depiction. Given that pantomimic gestures must have been maximally similar to bodily actions, we characterize them as typically (1) dominated by iconicity, (2) of the primary kind, (3) involving the whole body, (4) performed from a first-person perspective, (5) concerning peripersonal space, and (6) using the Enacting mode of representation.

Motion-event typology has moved into a “post-Talmian” terrain of approaches focusing on an open-ended number of patterns across languages and constructions. Following a proposal to distinguish between four typological clusters, we systematically compared the motion event descriptions in four languages suggested to exemplify these clusters: Swedish, French, Thai and Telugu, with the help of an elicitation-based study. 20 adult native speakers of each language were asked to describe 52 motion events, 38 of which were translocative. The stimuli varied with respect to the parameters caused/uncaused, bounded/unbounded motion as well as the viewpoint from which they were filmed. The descriptions were analyzed following Holistic Spatial Semantics and compared with respect to the categories Path, Direction, Region, Landmark, Manner and Cause, as well as the means of expressing these. The four languages patterned differently in significant ways. In terms of Path expression, French lagged behind the other languages, but with respect to Direction, it patterned together with Swedish. We demonstrate a number of such criss-crossing patterns, showing that there is no way to group the languages, thus implying at least four distinct typological prototypes. Further, we show that different kinds of motion situations, corresponding to different constructions, need to be compared separately.

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement) and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study which aims at assessing the potentially misleading effect of graphic elements on food packaging. The authors call these elements potentially misleading elements (PMEs) as they can give customers false expectations. They are either highlighted numerical information (30 per cent fibre, 8 per cent fat, 100 per cent natural […]) or pictorial information with no relation to the product (e.g. images of happy people). Design/methodology/approach In a combined decision task monitored by eye-tracking and a subsequence survey, the authors tested the impact of PMEs on common products. Combining different pairs of products, where one product had a PME, whereas the other did not, the authors could evaluate if preference correlated with the presence of a PME. Findings The authors found both types of PMEs to have analogous effects on participants’ preferences and correlate with participants’ visual attention. The authors also found evidence for a positive influence on a later explicit justification for the specific choice. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted in a lab environment and solely related to health-related decisions. The authors still need to know if these findings are transferable to real in-store decisions and other needs such as high quality or low price. This calls for further research. Practical implications The topic is important for food companies, and it might become a priority in managing brand equity, combining consumer preferences, loyalty and communicative fairness. Originality/value Using eye-tracking and retrospective interviews brings new insights to consumer’s decision-making and how misleading potentially occurs.

As part of a long-term project investigating the relevance of phenomenology for (cognitive) linguistics we analyse two central, interrelated concepts:embodied intersubjectivity(intercorporeality) andsedimentation. With respect to the first, we spell out a number of different intercorporeal structures, emanating at the most fundamental level from the dualLeibkörpernature of the body. Further, we demonstrate that sedimentation is more than a ‘geological metaphor’ as meaning is intrinsically layered in human experience. This is first illustrated by reviewing evidence from ontogenetic semiotic development within the framework of the Mimesis Hierarchy model (Zlatev 2013). Then, we focus on the linguistic construal of situations lacking actual motion in dynamic terms through expressions of non-actual motion such asThe road goes through the forestandHe was uplifted by her smile. We review studies of non-actual motion in Swedish, English, French, Bulgarian and Thai extending and re-formulating previous analyses. We argue that the present analysis is more adequate than cognitive linguistic explanations in terms of ‘mental simulation’ and ‘conceptual metaphor’. We conclude by pointing out how our phenomenological investigation can help resolve a number of classical dilemmas in semantics: Is language primarily grounded in the body or in society? Is the ontology of linguistic meaning mental or social? What is the relationship between pre-linguistic experiences and linguistic conventions?

Cognitive linguistic and semiotic accounts of metaphor have addressed similar issues such as universality, conventionality, context-sensitivity, cross-cultural variation, creativity, and “multimodality.” However, cognitive linguistics and semiotics have been poor bedfellows and interactions between them have often resulted in cross-talk. This paper, which focuses on metaphors in Greek street art, aims to improve this situation by using concepts and methods from cognitive semiotics, notably the conceptual-empirical loop and methodological triangulation.In line with the cognitive semiotics paradigm, we illustrate the significance of the terminological and conceptual distinction between semiotic systems (language, gesture, and depiction) and sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste). Thus, we restrict the term multimodality to the synergy of two or more different sensory modalities and introduce the notion of polysemiotic communication in the sense of the intertwined use of two or more semiotic systems.In our synthetic approach, we employ the Motivation and Sedimentation Model (MSM), which distinguishes between three interacting levels of meaning making: the embodied, the sedimented, and the situated. Consistent with this, we suggest a definition of metaphor, leading to the assertion that metaphor is a process of experiencing one thing in terms of another, giving rise to both tension and iconicity between the two “things” (meanings, experiences, concepts). By reviewing an empirical study on unisemiotic and polysemiotic metaphors in Greek street art, we show that the actual metaphorical interpretation is ultimately a matter of situated and socio-culturally-sensitive sign use and hence a dynamic and creative process in a real-life context.

Cognitive linguistic and semiotic accounts of metaphors have often discussed the complex phenomenon of metaphor in various ways, often addressing factors such as universality and conventionality, context-sensitivity, cross-cultural variation and creativity, deliberateness and “multimodality”. However, in most cases, such factors are investigated in isolation (cf. Gibbs 2017). Therefore, we propose a cognitive semiotic approach that can help us to seek convergences instead of divergences among such long-standing debated issues by using a coherent and consistent terminology, informed by cognitive semiotics.Cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphor propose an understanding of metaphor as an instrument of thought, rejecting the traditional notion of metaphor as a figurative device (e.g. Grady 1997; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) emphasizes that metaphors are more or less fixed (and static) conceptual mappings based on bodily and cultural experiences. What we argue instead is that such cognitive correspondences are not metaphors per se, but rather diagrams, serving as motivations for the use of contextually situated and culturally embedded metaphors.Taking the overall theme of the conference, iconicity, we highlight that similarity-based analogies (diagrams) between source and target are the dominant motivating factors for metaphor creation and interpretation. At the same time, the semiotic grounds of indexicality and symbolicity (based on sociohistorical awareness, background knowledge and context) are closely interacting with iconicity. This conforms with the view that metaphors are the most complex iconic signs (Peirce 1974 [1931]) especially when understood as creative, emergent, and dynamic processes, which are socio-culturally derived and contextually influenced (Kövecses 2015, Müller 2008, Sonesson 2015).Our presentation argues for a synthetic cognitive semiotic investigation of metaphors in Greek street art by bringing together complementary perspectives from semiotics and cognitive linguistics.

The paper rethinks a proposal for a unified cognitive semiotic framework,The Semiotic Hierarchy,in explicitly phenomenological terms, following above all the work of Merleau-Ponty. The main changes to the earlier formulation of the theory are the following. First, the claim that a general concept of meaning can be understood as the value-based relationship between the subject and the world is shown to correspond to the most fundamental concept of phenomenology:intentionality, understood as “openness to the world.” Second, the rather strict nature of the original hierarchy of meaning levels made the model rather static and one-directional, thus resembling an old-fashionedscala naturae. Reformulating the relationship between the levels in terms of the dynamical notion ofFundierungavoids this pitfall. Third, the phenomenological analysis allows, somewhat paradoxically, both a greater number of levels (life, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, sign function, language) and less discrete borders between these. Fourth, there is an intimate relation between (levels and kinds of) intentionality and normativity, making the normativity of language a special case. Fifth, to each level of meaning corresponds a dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation, with corresponding normative structures (e.g., habits, emotions, conventions, signs and grammar) both emerging from and constraining, but not determining, subject-world interactions. Sixth and finally, the analysis follows the basic phenomenological principle to examine the phenomena without theoretical preconceptions, and without premature explanations. This implies a focus on human experience, even when dealing with the “biological” level of meaning, with the possibility of extending the analysis to non-human subjects through empathy. The intention is that this phenomenologically interpreted version of the Semiotic Hierarchy may serve as a useful tool against any kind of meaning reductionism, whether biological, mental, social or linguistic.

We introduce this special issue on "Meaning making: Enactive, participatory, interactive, symbolic" by first pointing out where cognitive-semiotic and ecological approaches agree: meaning is to be construed as a dynamic, multiscalar phenomenon. We then review the six papers in relation to one another, revealing both overlaps and sites of possible tension. We view these tensions as foci for further development of cognitive semiotics in its aim to be a truly transdisciplinary science of meaning.

Sentences with motion verbs describing static situations have been seen as evidence that language and cognition are geared toward dynamism and change (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000; Langacker in Concept, image, and symbol: the cognitive basis of grammar, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1990). Different concepts have been used in the literature, e.g., fictive motion, subjective motion and abstract motion to denote this. Based on phenomenological analysis, we reinterpret such concepts as reflecting different motivations for the use of such constructions (Blomberg and Zlatev in Phenom Cogn Sci 13(3):395-418, 2014). To highlight the multifaceted character of the phenomenon, we propose the concept non-actual motion (NAM), which we argue is more compatible with the situated cognition approach than explanations such as "mental simulation" (e.g., Matlock in Studies in linguistic motivation, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2004). We investigate the expression of NAM by means of a picture-based elicitation task with speakers of Swedish, French and Thai. Pictures represented figures that either afford human motion or not (±afford); crossed with this, the figure extended either across the picture from a third-person perspective (3 pp) or from a first-person perspective (1 pp). All picture types elicited NAM-sentences with the combination [+afford, 1 pp] producing most NAM-sentences in all three languages. NAM-descriptions also conformed to language-specific patterns for the expression of actual motion. We conclude that NAM shows interaction between pre-linguistic motivations and language-specific conventions.

“Mixing Metaphor” is a compilation of 12 chapters by prominent researchers, introduced by Raymond Gibbs, one of the main actors in the eld of metaphor studies. It is a highly timely contribution that lls a gap between the pre-theoret- ical notion of ‘mixed metaphors’, largely known to the (English-speaking) pub- lic as something to be avoided as it re ects poor style or even sloppy thinking, and scholarly research on metaphor, where the topic has received little attention. In the Introduction, Gibbs discusses the example the city’s proposal to skim the frosting, pocket the cake, and avoid paying the fair, reasonable value for the meal is hound that will not hunt, and proposes that such metaphor mixing should not be viewed negatively, but rather as a natural reflection of “people’s cognitive flexibility to think of abstract concepts in a myriad of metaphorical ways” (p. vii). But this is a rather too positive an assessment.

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement), and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario

In two complementary experiments we took an integrated approach to a set of tightly interwoven, yet rarely combined questions concerning the spontaneous interpretation of novel (unfamiliar) noun-noun compounds (NNCs) when encountered in isolation, and possible (re)interpretations of novel as well as conventional (familiar) NNCs when encountered in verbo-visual context. To enhance ecological validity, we mirrored our research questions in real-life concerns on the naming of commercial food products and the risk of consumers being misled by the names that producers give to them, focusing on the Danish food market and using Danish NNCs. Specifically, we addressed a highly productive type of compound food names where the modifier denotes a geographical entity and the head denotes a type of food, e.g. Hawaii pizza. Our findings contribute new evidence to central issues of (cognitive) linguistic theory concerning the relations between semantics and pragmatics, as well as system and usage, and psycholinguistic issues concerning the processing of NNCs. New insights and methodological tools are also provided for supporting future best practices in the field of food naming and labelling.

Developmental and comparative studies of the ability to understand communicative intentions using object-choice tasks raise questions concerning the semiotic properties of the communicative signals, and the roles of rearing histories, language and familiarity. We adapted a study by Tomasello, Call, and Gluckman (1997), in which a “helper” indicated the location of a hidden reward to children of three ages (18, 24, and 30 months) and to four chimpanzees, by means of one of four cues: Pointing, Marker, Picture and Replica. For the chimpanzees, we controlled for familiarity by using two helpers, one unfamiliar and one highly familiar. Even 18-months performed well on Pointing and Marker, while only the oldest group clearly succeeded with Picture and Replica. Performance did not correlate with scores for the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory (SECDI). While there were no positive results for the chimpanzees on the group level, and no effect of familiarity, two chimpanzees succeeded on Pointing and Marker. Results support proposals of a species difference in understanding communicative intentions, but also highlight the need to distinguish these from the complexity of semiotic vehicles and to consider both factors.

Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological reanalysis of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality.

The paper proposes that intersubjectivity develops in children along a progression of five, more or less distinct, stages of semiotic development. The theoretical model within which this is couched is the Mimesis Hierarchy (MH) model (Zlatev & Andrén 2009). As in previous treatments, the MH-model focuses on bodily mimesis, its ―precursors‖ (empathetic perception) and ―post-developments‖ (conventionality, language and narrative). Mimesis is pivotal since it provides the basis for the development of (i) conventions (through imitation), (ii) intentional communication, and (iii) for bringing the two together in communicative, shared representations (signs). The main difference from previous applications is in the treatment of the concepts of representation and communicative intent. Due to recent empirical findings, and a more bodily-enactive and social-oriented perspective, I propose that Stage 2 gives rise to imitation and mimetic schemas (Zlatev 2007, in press), but that the first gestures (or vocalizations) of children are neither externalizations of these "internal representations", nor fully-fledged representations/signs on their own, but action schemas bidirectionally associated with particular contexts. That would explain why the onset of intentional communication occurs in Stage 3 with pointing and other deictic gestures (such as showing), which are not representations or fully-fledged (explicit) signs, but rather performative communicative acts, accompanied with makers of communicative intent. It is first in Stage 4 that the proto-representations of Stage 2 and the communicative intent of Stage 3 are combined to give rise to communicative iconic gestures, and more generally to the "insight" of using communicative, shared representations, or what is commonly referred to as symbols or signs.

Cognitive Linguistics began as an apotheosis of lived experience, but has over the years diversified into many different stands, interpreting the notion of “experience” and along with it the notion of “cognition” in conflicting ways: individual or social, prelinguistic or linguistic, unconscious or conscious? These issues are not only philosophical as they hold crucial implications for methodology. Here, I propose that most of them can be resolved with the help of phenomenology, “the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience” (Sokolowski 2000. Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2). Cogent syntheses are proposed to the individual/social and prelinguistic/linguistic debates, showing that scholars like Langacker, Talmy and Itkonen have focused on complementary aspects of implicitly phenomenological investigations. Third-person, “objective” methods are necessary for extending the scope of such investigations, but epistemologically secondary. Thus, the focus of Cognitive Linguistics can be brought back to experience, albeit in a more mature manner than 30 years ago.

The article provides an overview of ongoing research and key characteristics of Cognitive Semiotics, an emerging field dedicated to the “transdiciplinary study of meaning”, involving above all researchers from semiotics, linguistics, developmental and comparative psychology and philosophy. The combination of the following features distinguish it from other synthetic approaches: (a) integration of theoretical and empirical research; (b) ontological pluralism and methodological triangulation; (c) influence of phenomenology; (d) focus on dynamism and (e) the ambition of true transdisciplinarity. Its ultimate goal is to provide new insights into the nature and culture of human beings, as well as other meaning-making creatures.

Starting from emphasizing the richness of human experience, over twenty years ago, Cognitive Linguistics currently oscillates between a positivist and a subjectivist perspective both of which reveal an ontologically and methodologically limited understanding of language. I propose that E. Coseriu’s Integral Linguistics can substantially broaden this understanding, in distinguishing between three levels and three points of view, or perspectives, on linguistic (and cognitive) reality. Coseriu’s “ matrix” of levels and perspectives is discussed, offering an interpretation along phenomenological lines. A key point is the emphasis on consciousness rather than “ the cognitive unconscious”. Finally, I outline how the distinctions made within Integral Linguistics can help resolve debates within Cognitive Linguistics concerning the nature of “ image schemas” and “ conceptual metaphor”., De la linguistique cognitive à la linguistique intégrale et réciproquement. En s’appuyant, depuis maintenant plus de vingt ans, sur la richesse de l’expérience humaine, la Linguistique Cognitive oscille actuellement entre des perspectives positiviste et subjectiviste qui toutes deux limitent, ontologiquement et méthodologiquement, toute compréhension du langage. Nous soutenons que la Linguistique Intégrale de E. Coseriu peut élargir cette compréhension en distinguant trois niveaux et trois points-de-vue, ou perspectives, sur la réalité linguistique (et cognitive). Mobilisant et questionnant la «matrice » des niveaux et perspectives proposée par Coseriu, nous en proposerons une interprétation phénoménologique. Un point-clé nous semble reposer sur la distinction entre " conscience" et " inconscient cognitif". Nous soulignons enfin la manière dont les distinctions faites par la Linguistique Intégrale peuvent aider à résoudre les débats inhérents à la Linguistique Cognitive, débats relatifs notamment à la nature des «schémas-images » et des «métaphores conceptuelles »., Zlatev Jordan. From Cognitive to Integral Linguistics and Back Again. In: Intellectica. Revue de l'Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, n°56, 2011/2. Linguistique cognitive : une exploration critique. pp. 125-147.

It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressions and contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson’s distinction between primary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Köhler, and recently popularized by V. Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentation presented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics.

We performed a set of experiments dealing with the interpretation of novel Place–Food noun–noun compounds (NNCs) denoting fictive food products, in Danish. These were used in order to address concerns of linguistic theory, in particular the interrelation between semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics—investigating the role of sentential context for the interpretation of noun–noun compounds, and consumer oriented food labeling research. In the first experiment, a significant proportion of the novel NNCs was found to have a pre-contextually biased interpretation, in the majority of the cases conforming to what is usually considered the “default” interpretation for the studied type of compounds: FOOD ORIGINATING IN PLACE. In a subsequent experiment, this was however found to be easily overturned when sentential context supported what was initially found to be the least preferred interpretation. This contrasts with previous research comparing the role of such context on conventional NNCs. This suggests a qualitative difference between novel pre-contextually biased NNCs and conventional NNCs, and has implications for the semantics–pragmatics boundary, which we discuss. Furthermore, the three types of interpretations offered to the participants: ORIGINATING IN, RECIPE FROM and REMINDS OF, were shown to form an implicational hierarchy, which could explain the “asymmetric” preferences attributed to them by the participants in the experiments.