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Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future or hypothetical events. Displacement poses an important challenge for language learning. How can children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available? We suggest that caregivers provide children with iconic vocal and gestural cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents to support displaced learning. We collected an audio-visual corpus of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions (N = 71, 24-58 months, 37 female) and annotated the range of vocal and manual behaviours caregivers produced. We found that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts, using other cues when objects were present. Thus, we map caregivers’ non-linguistic behaviours, showing that they provide iconic cues to support displaced language learning and processing.

Chiasmus fundamentally involves iconicity. As a bi-lateral symmetrical figure that can have both an ornamental and a rhetorical function, it occurs on all levels of texts - sounds and graphemes, words, sentences, lines, chapters and entire books as well as on the narrative and on the conceptual level. The chiastic mirror-image design in which the second part is balanced against the first is however not limited to language but also appears in art and architecture. As recent cognitive research has shown, chiasmus forms an important strategy through its simple but unique design. This has to do with its spatial shape and how the crisscrossing of lines and paths that takes place in the X-figure is cognized, perceptually and experientially – suggesting itself as the origin of human abilities such as forming analogies and using conceptual integration. This is what my contribution explores, with example from James Joyce’s Ulysses.

International audience

Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which iconicity in face-to-face communication (spoken and signed) is a powerful vehicle for bridging between language and human sensori-motor experience, and, as such, iconicity provides a key to understanding language evolution, development and processing. In language evolution, iconicity might have played a key role in establishing displacement (the ability of language to refer beyond what is immediately present), which is core to what language does; in ontogenesis, iconicity might play a critical role in supporting referentiality (learning to map linguistic labels to objects, events, etc., in the world), which is core to vocabulary development. Finally, in language processing, iconicity could provide a mechanism to account for how language comes to be embodied (grounded in our sensory and motor systems), which is core to meaningful communication.

This chapter focuses on the semantic and pragmatic uses of space. The questions addressed concern how sign space (i.e. the area of space in front of the signer’s body) is used for meaning construction, how locations in sign space are associated with discourse referents, and how signers choose to structure sign space for their communicative intents. The chapter gives an overview of linguistic analyses of the use of space, starting with the distinction between syntactic and topographic uses of space and the different types of signs that function to establish referent-location associations, and moving to analyses based on mental spaces and conceptual blending theories. Semantic-pragmatic conventions for organizing sign space are discussed, as well as spatial devices notable in the visual-spatial modality (particularly, classifier predicates and signing perspective), which influence and determine the way meaning is created in sign space. Finally, the special role of simultaneity in sign languages is discussed, focusing on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions of simultaneous constructions.

International audience; Among the varied “stylistic liberties” (Harrison, 1992: 61) that characterize Salman Rushdie’s baroque writing style, two opposite syntactic peculiarities stand out, which I have named ‘the syntax of continual flow’ and ‘the syntax of restraint’. Both mark “exophoric” iconicity (Nöth, 2001: 22) for they mirror the fictional world of Rushdie’s narratives. The iconic ‘syntax of continual flow’, which is achieved through “psychological sequencing” and “juxtaposition” (Leech & Short 1981: 190; 192-193), mimics the protagonist’s inner state, while the iconic ‘syntax of restraint’, which consists of very short and elliptical constructions, reflects the tense atmosphere of the depicted scene. This paper aims to discover how this mainly “diagrammatic” iconicity (Fischer & Nänny 1999: xxii-xxiii) can be translated into French. It therefore consists in an analysis of two selected extracts from Midnight’s Children (1981) and their French translation by Jean Guiloineau. It turns out that, owing to the discrepancies between the English and the French syntactic constraints (Guillemin-Flescher 1981), the translator cannot simply mimic the English text's iconicity. Yet Guiloineau managed to preserve it thanks to some measure of compensation, either by simplifying and clarifying the structure of the text and the meaning conveyed or through his clever choice of determiners, whose combination provides both exophoric and endophoric iconicity.