Iconicity in syntax and the architecture of linguistic theory
Linguistic iconicity has been studied since ancient times (e.g., Plato’s
Cratylus, see
Cooper & Hutchinson 1997). Within modern grammatical description, this notion was
mostly developed by Jakobson and Benveniste; nowadays, iconicity in language is even being experimentally tested (e.g.,
Blasi et al. 2016;
Diatka & Milička 2017).
However, most studies on linguistic iconicity pertain to prosody, sound symbolism, or morphology; syntactic iconicity has been
vastly underexplored. In this paper, we present two hypotheses concerning
syntactic iconicity: (1) syntactic
descriptions of natural language strings have an inherent structure which is isomorphic to that of representations in some other
component of grammar or a non-grammatical system; or (2) linear order imposed on phrase structure is isomorphic to that in some
other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system. We will argue in favour of the former, which constitutes a novel
perspective on iconicity in grammar. We furthermore discuss the place that iconicity may have in the architecture of a generative
system.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Some preliminary remarks
- 2.Empirical support for iconicity in grammar
- 2.1Iconicity in the category of verbal aspect in Czech
- 2.2The limitation of the role of linear order in the expression of Case
- 3.Order in grammar and iconic relations: Two hypotheses and four theories
- 4.Previous approaches: A critical assessment
- 4.1The generative approach: Newmeyer (1992)
- 4.2Haiman’s distance-based approach
- 5.Architectural concerns in transformational frameworks
- 6.Towards a formal definition of iconicity
- 6.1Revising the architecture of grammar: How to capture iconicity
- 7.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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