IAS Excellence Lecture: linguistic iconicity

The Institute of Advanced Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University organises a free event as part of the IAS Excellence Lectures, a series of lectures organised by the Institute under the patronage of the Rector of Nicolaus Copernicus University. The next lecture will take place on November 18 at 5:00 p.m.

As part of this series, researchers representing Priority Research Teams are invited to present the most important recent achievements in their fields in an accessible and inspiring way. These meetings provide an opportunity to learn about pioneering research, participate in discussions, and exchange ideas.

On November 18, Prof. Bodo Winter (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom) will deliver a lecture titled “The linguistic sign isn't arbitrary.”

Abstract: Iconicity is the perceived resemblance between aspects of a sign’s meaning and aspect of a sign’s form. It occurs across spoken and signed languages, including iconic prosody, co-speech gestures, onomatopoeia, ideophones, and basic vocabulary. A recent wave of experimental, corpus, and typological research has revealed that iconicity is far more widespread than previously thought. In this talk, I will review recent empirical work from our lab and highlight how it fits a construal-based perspective of iconicity (Bellugi & Klima, 1976; Wilcox, 2004; Occhino et al., 2017; Winter et al., 2026). Much of the opposition that the concept of iconicity has received in linguistics stems from an over-emphasis of the universal nature of iconicity, and an under-appreciation of the extent to which it is based on construal, and hence variable between individuals and different communities.

I then turn to a central conceptual problem: the confusing, and often conflicting definitions of ‘arbitrariness’. Recent philosophical work (Planer & Kalkman, 2021; Gasparri et al., 2022) highlights that the label ‘arbitrary’ means different things in different contexts, such as arbitrariness as non-iconicity, arbitrariness as non-systematicity, or arbitrariness as conventionality. A closer look at this web of interrelated senses reveals that the banner notion of arbitrariness is not needed and, in fact, actively damaging as it leads to false dichotomies, such as the idea that conventions are somehow inimical to iconicity. Drawing on Keller’s (1998) sign theory and Flaksman’s (2017, 2020) notion of de-iconization, I will show that everything that is generally attributed to the principle of arbitrariness results from the interplay of conventions and regular processes of language change. I will conclude that in order to get a clear picture of the linguistic sign and the different evolutionary forces that act upon it, we need to abandon the notion of arbitrariness altogether.

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