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Announcement and Call for Papers
Fourth Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature
Université catholique de Louvain
Louvain-la-Neuve, 27 — 29 March 2003
As a follow-up to studies presented at three previous symposiaheld in Zurich (1997), Amsterdam (1999) and Jena (2001) this international and interdisciplinarysymposium will present a fourth series of detailed case studies. The scholarly aimof the conference is to provide evidence for the pervasive presence of iconicity(i.e. form miming meaning, form miming form) in language and literature. Focussingon the Germanic and Romance languages, papers are expected to study iconically usedforms at all levels of language (sound, rhythm, typography, vocabulary, syntax),in narrative and poetic form, and in all varieties of discourse (literary texts,historical texts, political texts, pidgins and creoles, advertising, children's language,sign language, language and music, literature and music, etc.). The type of iconicitymay range from the more "imagic" or concrete to the more abstract or "diagrammatic".
This symposium will open up its range of interest to music, understood as a languagein its own right or as an element of complex messages (i.e. opera, songs, advertising,etc.)
For information on the whole iconicity project, please check:
http://home.hum.uva.nl/iconicity
For information on the upcoming conference and preliminary registration, please check:
http://iconicity.fltr.ucl.ac.be
We welcome proposals addressing any of these issues. Abstractsof no more than 500 words together with a brief c.v. should be sent (preferably bye-mail) to:
Prof. Dr. Costantino Maeder, Université catholiquede Louvain, Pl. B. Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Phone: +32 10 47 4953; fax: +32 10 47 25 79; e-mail: maeder@rom.ucl.ac.be
before
1 November 2002
For further information, please contact Prof. CostantinoMaeder
or:
Prof. Dr. Olga Fischer, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012VT Amsterdam,The Netherlands. Phone: +31-20-5253825; fax: +31-20-5253052; e-mail: olga.fischer@hum.uva.nl.
or:
Prof. Dr. Max Nänny, Universität Zürich, Englisches Seminar, Plattenstrasse47, 8032 Zürich.
Phone: +41-1-3638850; fax: +41-1-6344908; e-mail: naenny@es.unizh.ch.
| Date | Time | Activity (location in bold) | ||
| Session A | Session B | Session C | ||
| Salle du Conseil FLTR (Place Blaise Pascal, 1) | ||||
| March 26 | 19:00 | Conference Warming | ||
| March 27 | 8:30 | Car pooling from hotel Mercure | ||
| Room More 53 | ||||
| 9:00 | PLENARY SESSION: BOUISSAC Iconicity or Iconization? Probing the Dynamic Interface between Language and Perception |
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| 10.00 | Coffee/tea | |||
| Room More 72 | Room More 73 | Room More 74 | ||
| 10:30 | BEUKES The Poem as Icon of the Painting: Poetic Iconicity on the Basis Johannes Vermeer and Tom Gouws |
NÄNNY Iconic Uses of Rhyme |
ROLAND Iconicité dans la poésie montalienne. Lecture de Corno inglese et repérage des récurrences caractéristiques de la macrostructure des Accordi. |
|
| 11:15 | ROUSSEAU La double iconicité dans l'ordre des éléments des langues naturelles |
WOLF Iconic Blanks in Literary Texts |
NAKAJIMA Iconic Deconstruction in Ezra Pound: Meaning and Sound in The Cantos |
|
| 12:00 | BRINZEU The Iconicity of the Signs of Punctuation |
KUHN Narrative Structures and Iconicity in Yasmina Reza’s Une désolation (1999) |
GIUDICETTI Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili and the number of paragraphs |
|
| Restaurant Le Sablon (Rue du Sablon) | ||||
| 12:45 | Lunch | |||
| Room More 71 | Room More 73 | Room More 74 | ||
| 14:15 | DE ASPRER Cubisme en traduction et iconicité cubiste |
ORTH The Iconic Representation of Consciousness in Poetry and Narrative Fiction |
LEONE 'Reality Effect and Iconicity' in the Representations of Violence: Fights, Battles, Death. |
|
| 15:00 | FALLON Les stratégies iconiques de Carmelo Bene |
VOROBYOVA Iconicity of Sudden Fiction and the Emotional Resonance Effect: Turning Suddenness into Sadness |
HUNKELER From Sigh to Sign: Iconicity in Early Modern French Poetry |
|
| 15.45 | Coffee/tea | |||
| Room More 71 | Room More 73 | |||
| 16:15 | PEDROJETTA La peinture dans les mots : l’étude des liens expressifs, entre « mot » et « image », dans l’œuvre critique de Giovanni Pozzi (1923-2002 |
GAHL The Beginnings of Iconicity in the Work of F. T. Marinetti |
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| 17:00 | MIALON-PONTES De l'iconicité comme critique du visible et exigence du visuel dans l'écriture de Valère Novarina - "l'interdit de la représentation" et "l'incarnation du verbe" ou comment faire une croix sur l'homme |
LINDLAR "Optophonie" by Raoul Hausmann: The search for a "language of the senses" |
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| 17:45 | End of the sessions | |||
| Salle du Conseil FLTR (Place Blaise Pascal, 1) | ||||
| 18:30 | Vin d'honneur | |||
| March 28 | 8:30 | Car pooling from hotel Mercure | ||
| Room More 53 | ||||
| 9:00 |
PLENARY SESSION |
|||
| 10:00 | Coffee/tea | |||
| Room More 72 | Room More 73 | Room More 74 | ||
| 10:30 | EDER Mimesis and Metaphor |
GEORIS Iconicity and the " Stile rappresentativo" : a few remarks taking Monteverdi as an example |
HALEVI-KIRTCHUK Iconic Correlations between Phonological, Morphological, Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Phenomena and their Impact on the Parole-Langue Dichotomy |
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| 11:15 | MUNAT Phraseological units and metaphors as icons in Henry James The Sacred Fount |
MARRON L'iconicité dans Vertiges(2001), un Opéra/Théâtre de Jean-Pierre Drouet, Patrick Kermann et Christine Dormoy |
WHITE Coconut Shells and Creaking Doors': The Iconicity of Radio-Play Sound-Effects. De-familiarization versus Fidelity |
|
| 12:00 | HAMPE Correspondence vs. Similarity in the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor |
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| Restaurant Le Sablon (Rue du Sablon) | ||||
| 12:45 | Lunch | |||
| Room More 74 | Room More 73 | Room More 57 | ||
| 14:15 | CHANG Plato and Peirce on Likeness and Semblance |
HERLOFSKY Now You See It, Now You Don't. Imagic Iconicity and Spatial Mapping of Signed (JSL) Discourse |
HAYEZ Les logogrammes de Christian Dotremont : de l’illisible au visible |
|
| 15:00 | MONNERET Relative Motivation in G. Guillaume’s Theory |
SCHÖNEFELD Frozen Locutions - Frozen Dimensions: left and right in English, German and Russian |
RUFFA Dalí théoricien, peintre et écrivain surréaliste : pour un automatisme psychique placé sous le signe de l icône |
|
| 15:45 | Coffee/tea | |||
| Room More 74 | Room More 76 | Room More 57 | ||
| 16:15 | MEYER From Hypothesis via Observation to Fact: Handling Data and Generalisations in Academic Discourse |
GRALL Heyse, la théorie du faucon et le Décaméron |
MASUDA A Cat Goes Bow-wow and a Dog Goes Meow? |
|
| 17:00 | TABAKOWSKA Point of View and Iconicity |
NANNICINI L'iconicité dans Malina de Bachmann et dans “La vie mode d'emploi” de Perec |
LJUNGBERG Photographs in Narrative |
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| 17:45 | End of the sessions | |||
| Restaurant La Sablonnière (Rue du Sablon) | ||||
| 19:00 | Conference Dinner | |||
| March 29 | 8:30 | Car pooling from hotel Mercure | ||
| Room More 53 | ||||
| 9:00 | PLENARY SESSION KLINKENBERG Clés cognitivistes pour une solution au problème de l'iconisme (reading of his paper) |
|||
| 10:00 | Coffee/tea | |||
| Room More 71 | Room More 72 | Room More 73 | ||
| 10:30 | HAMPE & SCHÖNEFELD Creative Syntax II : What Corpus Linguists See that Other Analysts May Not |
PALANCIUK « Toute pensée est en signes ». L’iconicité : archéologie d un concept |
FILL Mimesis lost - meaning regained |
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| 11:15 | HOLLMANN The Extended Binding Hierarchy and Infinitival Complementation in English Causatives |
SARDO Iconicity and Titles : an Example From Pirandello |
TILLEUIL L'iconicité de l'image : entre ontologie et idéologie |
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| 12:00 | BOTTINEAU Cognitive Iconicity in English Grammatical Words and Morphemes |
WANLIN Iconicité et rhétoricité dans les ekphrasis poétiques de Théophile Gautier |
HOLZ How do Perfume Advertisements Smell? Some Observations on the Semiotic Principle of Iconicity in Internet Advertisements for Perfumes for Men |
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| Room More 53 | ||||
| 12:45 | PLENARY SESSION SLOBIN Linguistic representations of motion events: What is signifier and what is signified |
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| Collège Thomas More | ||||
| 13:45 | End of the sessions And delicious sandwiches |
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Paul Bouissac, University of Toronto, Department of French
Iconicity or Iconization? Probing the dynamic interface between language and perception.
Theories of linguistic iconicity and their applications to literary analysis are conceptually dependent upon theories of perception, which themselves derive from more general philosophical assumptions or ideological commitments. The current iconicist doxa rather polemically considers iconicity as a property of natural languages (in their phonic, lexical syntactical and discursive aspects) and construes literature as a privileged locus where this property can be observed in its most compelling manifestations by showing how our perceptions of language-objects closely match our perceptions of various aspects of our environment or other non-linguistic experiences. The purpose of this paper is to question some of the psychological (or cognitive) assumptions which appear to have driven the modern study of iconicity in language and literature. It seems indeed that the notion of iconicity understood mostly as resulting from a uni-directional constraining of language and language productions by humans' perceived environment, can be reconsidered in view of emerging theories of perception which emphasize the proactive role of attending and constructing originating in the human brain. Such alternative views, while they do not totally reverse the dominant perspective, nevertheless suggest the possibility of developing a markedly different approach to the study of the isomorphic and isochronic relationships which can be observed between languages and their referents. Through a redefinition of the notion of "iconization", the capacity of literary language to impact decisively upon phenomenological perception will be explored in this paper. A discussion of André Breton's notion of the surrealist image, as a rhetorical trope, and of short poems by Francis Ponge will provide some examples of the iconization process as it is proposed to understand it in the paper.
Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
Dan I. Slobin, University of California, Berkeley
Linguistic representations of motion events: What is signifier and what is signified?
The call to this conference defines iconicity as "a natural resemblance or analogy between the form of a sign ('the signifier') and the object or concept ('the signified') it refers to in the world or rather in our perception of the world." In the case of motion events, both signifier and signified show considerable crosslinguistic variation. A range of signifier types can be identified: for example, the typical main verb in a clause may encode path ('enter') or manner ('run') or figure ('flow'); path may be encoded by a verb ('enter') or a particle ('in'); dimensions of motion events may be specified by relations of elements within a construction (word-order variation, casemarking, verb argument structure, etc.). Characterizing the signified, however, is more challenging. The definition of iconicity assumes that one can identify entities "in our perception of the world" that provide "the signified." However, I will attempt to show that conceptions of motion events are, themselves, partly shaped by the form-meaning relations of individual languages. That is, what is taken to be iconic must be based on an analysis of the nature of event representation and preferred perspectives on event components. For example, Germanic languages abound in constructions in which a single manner-of-motion verb carries a figure along a complex path, e.g., 'She ran out of the house, across the yard, into the garage'. Such constructions seem to be iconic of a visual image, or conception of an activity-running-that extends across path segments. In Romance languages, where path segments typically require separate verbs, it is more typical to say, 'She exited the house in a run, crossed the yard, and entered the garage'. Such constructions seem to be iconic of a conceptualization of separable path segments with the possibility of an activity type that co-occurs with a path segment ('exit in a run'). On the basis of analysis of narrative texts (oral and written), conversations, and psycholinguistic experiments on mental imagery and memory for events, I will suggest that there are mutual relationships between signifier and signified. Linguistic forms do often reflect "a natural resemblance or analogy" between form and meaning, but meaning is not necessarily a fixed and universal "perception" or "concept" of entities and events in the world. Examples will be drawn from languages of various groups: Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Semitic, Turkic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan.
Marthinus Beukes, Rand Afrikaans University
The poem as icon of the painting: poetic iconicity on the basis Johannes Vermeer and Tom Gouws
The poetic expression of a painting takes place on the basis of transposition of the visual text to a word text. In this way interaction between the poem text and visual text takes place. This interaction between poetry and the art of painting is described by Simonides of Ceos as follows: "poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens"/the poem is a speaking painting or the painting is a silent poem. The purpose of this paper will be to investigate in which way the poem is an depiction or representation of the painting signs. Within this framework it is assumed that the poem contributes in adding extra meaning to the painting. The iconicity of the poem text is therefore a portrayal of the painting content as visual embodiment.
In this paper it will be assumed that the iconic meaning processes of the Johannes Vermeer poems of Tom Gouws as meta-language function on behalf of the paintings. The focus of this paper will therefore be the establishment of a framework of description to put in words the iconic processes that are present in and around the poetry text. Poetry texts of Gouws that will be studied, will be viewed as scripts of the poems. The following poems will be used to show that the poet not only explores the painting text but also explores and confronts the language iconically: namely 'The Lacemaker'. The Astronomer', 'The Geographer', 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter', 'Lady Weighing Pearls' and 'The Men of Vermeer'. These poems will thus be read as visual texts and visual writing through which a particular way of iconic narrative is established.
Didier Bottineau, University of Caen
Cognitive iconicity in English grammatical words and morphemes
This paper focusses on the morphological structure of the grammatical words and morphemes (flexions and endings) of the English language. This study will demonstrate that the basic meaning of English grammatical words can be accounted for by taking into account the submorphemic markers which make them up : TH (as in the, this, that, there, then, thus, though) systematically expresses anaphora (reference to some semantic entity already mentioned in context), as opposed to WH (as in which, what, where, when, who, why), which expresses cataphora (the introduction of some unpredefined category) ; in the same way, other similar subsystems are to be found (I / A as in this / that, which / what, swim / swam etc., S/T as in plays / played, is [identification] / it [pre-identified], yes [approval] / yet [concession : revocation of a past approval], etc. Throughout grammatical systems, the I / A alternation denotes cognitive processes of assimilation vs dissimilation and the S / T pair is regularly associated with a present vs past contrast. The basic meanings of those three alternations are shared by all the operators in which they intervene, irrelevant of their functions in grammatical systems. Thus, individual phonemic and graphemic units may be devoid of intrinsic meaning in the lexicon, but in narrower closed-class categories of words and morphemes they do systematically acquire the ability to refer to some invariant basic meaning : the cognitive instruction borne by the sub-operator I is shared by all grammatical words displaying this marker. It is thus possible to analyze the global basic meaning of an operator like this into the interactions between the three sub-operators it contains, TH (for anaphoric reference), I (for identification) and S (for present nomination).
The semantics of grammatical sub-operators is not based on experiencial iconicity : their basic meanings do not consist in evoking salient perceptual properties (unlike those of lexical phonaesthemes / ideophones), neither are they based on phonosymbolic features (there is no link between the articulatory and acoustic properties of this of the submorpheme TH- and its ability to systematically refer to anaphoric reference) ; for this reason, submorphemic units are not intrinsically iconic at their own level, but the way in which they assemble to build up more complex operators cause the latter to be iconic since their morphological structure at word and morpheme level is motivated by the cluster of basic sub-operators selected in the make-up of their global basic meaning.
Our interpretation of this phenomenon is a naturalistic one : this marking of sub-processes by sub-morphemes in grammatical operators enables the speaker to provide the hearer with a set of cognitive instructions as to how to successfully construct the kind of relations the former wishes the latter to establish between lexical notions and syntagms. A noun like cat need not bear any submorphemic element indicating how to assemble the relevant prototype from a set of subproperties because the prototype can be reconstructed from a series of occurrences of the real thing met in one's individual experience, whereas purely relational operators like determiners, prepositions, pronouns, aspectual and modal auxiliaries and inflections, derivational endings, leave no mnesic trace from which a prototype might be derived : their relational meaning cannot be stabilized and memorized and has to be systematically reconstructed, hence the strategic choice of the English language (among many others belonging to unrelated families and types) to engrave in the very morphology of the operator submorphemic indicators about how the receiver should perform the assembling of basic cognitive procedures or cognemes such as anaphora / cataphora (TH / WH), conjunction / disjunction (I/A), proposition / validation / cancellation (R/S/T) to obtain the basic meaning of the embedding operator. Thus the grammatical operators of the English language can be said to bear traces of cognitive iconicity meant to assist the hearer in computing the network of semantic relations between notions.
At this stage it is not possible to decide whether the connection between form and substance in cognitive submorphemes is motivated by strong phonosymbolic pressure or by shared genetic origin in some remote and highly hypothetic mother tongue, all the more so as other possibilities may be considered to account for the phenomenon, such as a transfer of phonological cognitive procedures to semantic patterning. Alternatively, cognemes may stem from the reinvestment of matrices of orders given to pairs of articulators in phonological progamming into analogical orders applied to pairs of semantic notions, so that it is those cognitive patterns which mimick the relational possibilities provided by sound production rather than the opposite (sounds to not mimick perceptual properties of the cognemes). This model remains entirely open to whatever resolution might arise in the future if any and, for the time being, will content with describing facts of cognitive iconicity before making major theoretical assumptions regarding their origin.
For a longer presentation of the model: http://www.crisco.unicaen.fr/
Pia Brinzeu, University of Timisoara
The iconicity of the signs of punctuation
The purpose of my study is to analyse the way in which the signs of punctuation may gain iconic values, transcending both their semiotic indexicality and their immediate grammatical function. Moreover, due to their inherent imagistic power, they reveal a world of deep mystery and symbolism.This process is based on foregrounding and undergoes two stages: first, the iconicity of the signs of punctuation is revealed through singularization or reduplication; second, the visual shapes are loaded with meaning and transformed into symbols with a large connotational and poetic power. Examples are taken from the works of James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, Raymond Federman, and the Romanian novelist Nicolae Breban.
Agostino Casu, University of Berne
De la devise au sonnet. La poétique du portrait dans la lyrique italienne du XVIe siècle.
L'imitation de Pétrarque n'est que l'un des aspects de la poétique des auteurs lyriques du Seizième: le mieux connu, peut-être, mais pas toujours le plus remarquable d'entre eux. Chez les poètes italiens de la moitié du siècle, aussi bien que chez Maurice Scève ou Joachim Du Bellay (qui furent sans doute des italianisants, mais aussi des modèles pour certains Italiens de 'seconde génération') l'exercice du genre lyrique, et notamment la pratique du sonnet, se relie aussi au modèle ancien de l'épigramme, domaine privilégié, à plus d'un titre, de la philologie renaissante.
Or la poétique de l'épigramme ('epigramma', faut-il bien le rappeler, est aussi le terme d'usage commun, chez le théoriciens de l'époque, pour désigner aussi le sonnet des modernes), c'est en premier lieu une poétique de l'image. L'Anthologie grecque, sous la forme ('recensio Planudaea') que l'Occident connut jusqu'à l'orée du XVIIe siècle, se présente d'abord comme une collection de textes 'iconiques': c'est le cas des livres dits 'funéraires' (epithymbia) ou 'démonstratifs' (epideiktikà), qui contiennent pour la plupart des portraits de poètes, de savants, de personnages historiques ou mythologiques, aussi bien que des 'ekphrastikà', le livre consacré à la descripition d'oeuvres d'art. Mais c'est surtout avec le succès immédiat et vraiment européen des Emblèmes d'Alciati que l'épigramme se voit associé, de façon définitive, à une rhétorique de l'image.
Quels sont les reflets de ce parcours dans la forme du texte lyrique italien à la Renaissance? Est-ce qu'un nouveau régime de communication s'y instaure, à mi-chemin entre le discours et l''ostention'? Le but de ma communication ne serait pas celui de produire un compte-rendu érudit sur l'histoire des éditions et des traductions de l'Anthologie grecque et des Emblèmes, ni non plus de dresser une table des 'sources' épigrammatiques de tel ou tel sonnet italien ou français. Dans le cadre du Congrès, mon intention est plutôt celle d'esquisser une première typologie du sonnet 'iconique' renaissant (on trouve des sonnets-devise, sonnets-portrait, sonnets-épitaphe etc.), et en même temps d'indiquer quelques problèmes théoriques qui relèvent de l'analyse de ce type de textes. Notamment, il serait question d'illustrer, à l'aide de quelques exemples, le rapport entre la thématique visuelle et le statut rhétorique du genre examiné, aussi bien que les formes différentes de son rapport à l'image (proximité, substitution, analogie).
Han-Liang Chang, National Taiwan University
Plato and Peirce on Likeness and Semblance
In his well-known essay, 'What Is a Sign?'(CP 2.281, 285) Peirce uses 'likeness' and 'resemblance' interchangeably in his definition of icon. The synonymity of the two words has rarely, if ever, been questioned. Curiously, a locus classicus of the pair, at least in F. M. Cornford's English translation, can be found in a late dialogue of Plato's, namely, the Sophist. In this dialogue on the myth and truth of the sophists' profession, the mysterious 'stranger', who is most likely Socrates persona, makes the famous distinction between eikon (likeness) and fantasma (semblance) (236a,b).
For all his broad knowledge in ancient philosophy, Peirce never mentioned this parallel; nor has any Peircian scholar identified it. There seems to be little problem with eikon as likeness, but fantasma may give rise to a puzzle which this paper will attempt to solve. Plato uses two pairs of words: what eikon is to fantasma is eikastikhn (the making of likeness [235d]) to fantastikhn (semblance making [236c]). In other words, icons come into being because of the act of icon-making, which is none other than indexicality. Witness what Peirce says about the relationship between photographs and the objects they represent: 'But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature' (Ibid.). Thus the iconicity which links the representamen (sign) and its object is made possible not only by an interpretant, but also by indexisation.
Their possible etymological and epistemological links aside, the Peircian example of photographing and the Platonic discussion of painting and sculpturing in the Sophist, clearly show the physio-pragmatic aspect of iconicity. The paper will therefore reread the Peircian iconicity by closely analysing this relatively obscure Platonic text, and by so doing restore to the text its hidden semiotic dimension.
Jac Conradie, rand afrikaans university south africa
The signalling of emotion in the Middle Dutch miracle play Mariken van Nieumeghen
In Mariken van Nieumeghen (Mary of Nimmegen), a Middle Dutch miracle play in the rhetorical tradition, truth and authenticity are demonstrated to the audience mainly by means of emotional experience. The intense emotional reactions of the main characters, two protagonists and two antagonists, are revealed in tripartite textual patterns - repeated throughout the play - consisting of emotive, cognitive and conative sections, in this order: the emotional impact, its interpretation and the action called for, respectively. If one assumes that an intense emotion is a complex psychosomatic phenomenon ranging from a "state of mind", such as 'grief', to physical manifestations or indices, such as tears, the playwright has several options by which to display this. In Mariken all stops are pulled out. When Mariken's uncle realises that the woman dropped from a great height by the devil, is his niece, he employs a wide spectrum of expression in displaying his feelings (lines 904-8):
Helpt! Al dbloet mijns lichaems van boven tot ondre
Vercruypt mi, ic soudt wel betoghen.
Die tranen schieten mi uuten oghen,
Mijn aderen versterven, mijn coluer wert bleec;
Noyt en ghevoelde ic mi so weeck.
(Help! All the blood in my body, from top to bottom, ebbs away, that is quite clear. The tears shoot from my eyes, my veins grow numb, my complexion turns pale; I have never felt as feeble before.)This show of emotions ranges from an inner sensation of weakness, attributed by the character to an arrest of blood circulation, and the shedding of tears (which could be made visible to the audience, though perhaps with difficulty in the absence of modern techniques), to paleness, obviously not perceivable by the subject and thus a verbal sign subsituted for a physical manifestation, which in its turn is intended as an icon of emotion. The techniques employed in presenting emotion to and recreating it in a live audience and, in particular, the various levels of signalling employed by the medieval playwright, are the subject of this paper.
Nuria De Asprer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Cubisme en traduction et iconicité cubiste
L'observation des processus de signification déployés par les techniques de composition cubistes (cubisme analytique et cubisme synthétique), ainsi que leur rapport aux phénomènes de déplacement et condensation conçus en psychanalyse, nous amènent à préconiser une méthode cubiste de traduction qui tienne compte du texte en tant que productivité. La transposition de la technique cubiste des œuvres plastiques à la traduction de certains textes de facture cubiste, pourrait également s'étendre à la traduction de tout autre texte, si l'on veut bien identifier les processus cubistes dans les modes de fonctionnement, paradigmatique et syntagmatique, du langage.
Produire des textes-cibles cubistes au même titre que les textes de départ correspondants, n'implique pas de mimétisme, et ceci dans la mesure où l'iconicité signifiante ne relève pas de la copie. Par le biais de la traduction, l'iconicité cubiste nous montre, précisément, le rapport de l'iconique à la transformation et à la sémiose au sens de Pierce ; elle nous permet ainsi de renouer avec une critique de l'équivalence.
La version espagnole du poème Tour Eiffel de Vicente Huidobro et celle du poème Heure de Pierre Reverdy, que nous présenterons, fournissent un exemple d'application de la méthode iconiciste en traduction.
Thomas Eder, University of Vienna / Department of German Literature
Mimesis and Metaphor
A new use and meaning of these two concepts which stems from their mutual influence when they are used for the description of some aspects of the so called "Concrete Poetry"
In common discourse of literary criticism "Concrete Poetry" and mimesis are treated as two isolated and contradictory concepts. Mimesis used to be quoted as negative definition of "Concrete Poetry", e.g. by Siegfried J. Schmidt: "Concrete Art, in which medium represented whatever, is non-mimetic, generative art, which supersedes the sensory perception of visual reality and concentrates upon its own artistic mediality". On the other hand it is communis opinio that "Concrete Poetry" condemns the use of metaphors as rigid poetic means of a declined conception of poetry. Facing this background, Concrete Poetry is to be rethought - concerning its aesthetic and epistemological potential with regard to the connection of mimesis and metaphor.
In my paper an actual and renewed conception of mimesis shall be adapted to "Concrete Poetry". "representation", "imitation" and "mirroring" will be proofed as insufficient extensions of the concept of mimesis. On the contrary Walter Benjamin's notion of "mimetic potential" offers a different view on the qualities of mimesis. Benjamin stresses the importance of language and its mediality to mimesis: language as the "highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most perfect archive of non-sensorial similarity". He considers mimesis on the level of linguistic mediality; on that same level, which represents the nucleus in Schmidt's definition of Concrete Poetry.
In doing so I shall try to outline the mimetic potential of metaphors in literary texts. As Paul Ricoeur suggests that "relocated on the foundations provided by mimesis, metaphor ceases to be arbitrary and trivial", the iconic quality of metaphors and their connection to mimetic values is to be shown. And Ricoeur continues: "Considered formally, metaphor as a deviation represents nothing but a difference in meaning. Related to the imitation of our actions at their best, it takes part in the double tension that characterizes this imitation: submission to reality and fabulous invention, unaltering represantation and ennobeling elevation. This double tension constitutes the referential function of metaphor in poetry." Tracing this concept of a referential function of metaphor I shall argue that a naive understanding of representation calls forth a misinterpretation of the role of mimesis and metaphor in "Concrete Poetry". Only in the case of a grave misinterpretation of the Aristotelian mimesis one can confuse this concept with imitation or mirroring of the world by poetic means, especially by the use of canonical metaphors. This interpretation goes along with a different view at the function of metaphors in poetry, especially regarding their referential aspects. Ricoeur: "But the possibility that metaphorical discourse says something about reality collides with the apparent constitution of poetic discourse, which seems to be essentially non-referential and centred on itself. To this non-referential conception of poetic discourse I oppose the idea that the suspension of literal reference is the condition for the release of a power of second-degree reference which is properly poetic reference. Thus, to use an expression borrowed from Jakobson, one must not speak only of split sense but of 'split reference' as well."
Using Ricoeur's adopted "split reference" my paper shall outline that one must not speak of non-mimetic, non-metaphoric art in "Concrete Poetry" if this conception of "split-reality" is taken serious. Differing from Ricoeur's theoretical conception I shall concentrate on the formal aspects of metaphors in the light of "Concrete Poetry". That implies that my re-definition of mimesis and metaphor does not focus on the connection between mythos and mimesis which is predominant in Ricoeur. On the contrary I shall concentrate on the world-creating aspects of metaphor in "Concrete Poetry" which are stated to arise from the mimetical potential of language (in Benjamin's ideal sense) actualized by its use in "Concrete Poetry".
As a supplement to that thesis my paper discusses the problems of adapting Wittgenstein's Showing-Saying-Theme to the interpretation of "Concrete Poetry". (Early) Wittgenstein's realistic semantics of reference implies that the sentence shows the logical form of the world because they have it in common. And the sentence can only show that logical form, it can't say anything about it. Some theorists assume several works of "Concrete Poetry" to be intending to say something about the form they have in commen with the world because they present the representational qualities of language as their aesthetic dominant. Therefore, those theorists argue, these works "say" something about their showing of the logical form. I try to outline why interpreters misuse the Wittgensteinian distinction by applying it to "Concrete Poetry". The nucleus of Wittgenstein's distinction is that the showing of the logical form happens in all acts of (meaningful) communication, be it ordinary language communication be it (traditional) poetry, and that one cannot say (in form of ontologically focussed philosophical propositions) anything about it.
Marianne Fallon, Université catholique de Louvain
Carmelo Bene
L'œuvre narrative, dramatique, cinématographique, télévisuelle et radiophonique de Carmelo Bene est vouée à la déconstruction de l?image et, plus encore, à l?annulation de la représentation. Cette irrapresentabilità (et im-présentabilité), née du reflet de soi face au miroir, au double, non seulement renverse le langage, mais le fait (re-)naître. Carmelo Bene s?attaque à l?image en ce qu?elle a de ?vulgaire? : lorsqu?elle est présentée, figée, morte, ?déterminée à travers un langage mystifiant qui ne lui permet jamais de refléter la réalité et donc encore moins de faire abstraction d?une réalité?. Dès lors, il expérimente les limites entre visibilité et invisibilité de l?image, grâce à la surimpression et au développement d?une image stratiforme qui met diverses images en présence et les mélange. Ces images sont juxtaposées les unes aux autres dans un jeu continu de réversibilité. Les travaux audiovisuels les plus extrêmes de Carmelo Bene sont des ?textes? qui constituent en toute cohérence les conditions de leur propre incommunicabilité. C?est pourquoi ils furent qualifiés de textes ?possibles-impossibles?.
Nous verrons à travers une série de cas pratiques (les Amleto, les Macbeth, Riccardo III et Capricci), comment Carmelo Bene a tenté d?actualiser, de mettre en actes, cette problématique de la représentation déjà développée par de nombreux théoriciens (Shopenhauer, Bergson, Deleuze et son ?image cristal?, etc.). Nous montrerons aussi comment la pratique de réécriture de Bene fait partie intégrante de ce processus d? ?in-représentabilité?, par cette même juxtaposition des textes et des spectacles, et par la recherche systématique du visible à déformer dans les textes choisis. Il s?agira donc d?observer à la fois la pratique de Bene dans sa déstructuration de l?image et l?effectivité d?une éventuelle communication de cette pratique qui se veut ?contresens et où il n?y a plus rien à comprendre?
Adnan Fatani, University of Jedda
Title : The Iconic-cognitive Role of Plosives and Fricatives: A Phonosemantic Analysis of a Classical Arabic Prayer- Al-falaq (The Splitting).
This study is devoted to one particular subtype of sound symbolism, namely phonetic iconicity, or what is more often referred to as onomatopoeia, the notion that particular phonemes or sequential order of phonemes reenact processes and experiences in the external world. Despite numerous studies on this phenomenon in other languages, we know relatively little about phonetic iconicity in Arabic. The significance of this investigation emanates from the fact that it is the first attempt, that I am aware of, to collect descriptive data on phonetic iconicity in the Arabic language-system and to provide a descriptive model of sound-meaning correlation which has not been available in Arabic linguistics up to this time. The text chosen for illustration is one of the most well-known prayers in the Arabic language, renown for its powerful rhythms and sounds, namely Al-falaq (The Splitting), which represents chapter 113 of the Quran.
My basic aim is to demonstrate that the articulatory configuration and symmetrical patterning of key iconic words in the text function as a kind of iconic diagram that not only provides coherence but also plays a cognitive role in reenacting and explicating the controlling image of the text, namely the process of splitting, a three-fold physiological movement involving friction, compression and eruption from a circular cavity or nucleus. The image of splitting is argued via two basic types of consonants, the plosives and the fricatives, and their so-called positional frequency of occurrence in content words. The fricatives which are articulated by means of airflow passing through a narrow cavity, and the plosives which entail compression of airflow behind a barrier and a final eruption, mimic closely in a direct one-to-one correspondence the three-fold movements of splitting. The materials of the argument are all the multi-syllabic content words in the text, namely the five end-rhyme words (X-variables) and the three syntactically related agentive nouns (Y-variables). Results indicate that the semantic concept of division into halves, embodied in the superordinate word falaq, classified as an X variable, is also observed and acoustically mapped onto the rest of the X and Y variables in the text. It is my contention that the predominance of fricatives in word-initial position and plosives in word-final position is a motivated strategy that is highly relevant to the logic of the text since it is diagrammatically iconic of the process of splitting as it is performed in real time.
Alwin Fill, Graz University
Mimesis lost - meaning regained
In discussions of iconicity (both of the imagic and the diagrammatic kind) the emphasis is (naturally) laid as a rule on the aspect of similarity between the mimed and the mimer. In contrast to this, the present paper focuses on those cases of form meaning relationship where the iconicity is reduced through elements which either stand in opposition to each other or lack iconic relevance altogether. The author argues that through this (partial) conflict between form and meaning the effect of the remaining iconicity may actually be heightened and the unexpected loss of similarity may create new 'meaning'.Examples supporting this claim will be taken from text picture combinations in advertising and from complex messages involving word and music. For instance, an advertisement for Austrian Airlines in which the picture of a cellist mirrors the headline "The land of music" may be less effective than one where the expectation of iconicity is in part disappointed by a picture in which the theme of music is less obvious. Similarly, a song in which the music merely 'repeats' the meaning of the words may be artistically less convincing than one in which the two codes are partially in conflict with each other. The author argues that the creation of new meaning through reduced iconicity (and increased tension between mimer and mimed) is in line with post-modern thinking and is becoming increasingly important in all uses of language including advertising and art.
Peter Gahl, Universität Konstanz
The Beginnings of Iconicity in the Work of F. T. Marinetti
It goes without saying that iconicity plays a central role in the futurist poetry. John J. White in his seminal "Literary Futurism" (Oxford 1990) applies this concept successfully to many texts of the futurist authors, in particular to the visual poems known as `tavole parolibere´; however, in his reconstruction of `futurism´s exploration of the iconic´ he does not refer to any literary works created before 1914, nor (with one exception, the paragraphs concerning the use of onomatopoeia), to Marinettis "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista" from 1912. Our aim is to show that, contrary to this point of view, iconicity is in fact an important component of Marinetti´s poetical programme already in 1912, thus on the stage of the `technical manifesto´.
The guiding concept in Marinetti´s various poetical writings is undoubtly that of `analogy´ ("analogia"), which is also the key term in the definition of iconicity. We hold that at the stage of the `technical manifesto´ this concept is halfway between the basically symbolistic poetics of Marinetti´s pre-futurist works (considering the quest for audacious metaphors the very essence of poetry, like in the paragraph regarding the double nouns) and the more advanced versions of the `parole in libertà´ poetics, which are obviously iconic. An important feature of Marinetti`s `analogia´ is that it appeals explicitly to the `immaginazione intuitiva e divinatrice´ as opposed to the `logica´. This may well be seen as a correspondence to Charles S. Peirce´s attempt to enhance the deductive logics based upon (arbitrary) `symbols´ by a system of `existential graphs´ which - as icons - were meant to facilitate `abductive´, `iconic´ reasoning (cf., among other works, his "Prolegomena to an Apology of Pragmaticism").
But, apart from the onomatopoeia, which of Marinetti`s ideas developed in the 1912 `Manifesto tecnico´ can be regarded as `iconic´? The most important are the `destruction of syntax´ and the introduction of `weight and odour´. The latter anticipates the considerations concerning the `psychical and abstract onomatopoeia´ exposed mainly in "Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica" (1914), elements which clearly transgress the boundaries of plain imitation of reality (which was then the most common reproach to the `parole in libertá´, uttered for instance by Guillaume Apollinaire who declared them "didactiques et antilyriques"). The `destruction of syntax´ (which is motivated by the aforementioned refusal of `logic´), is basically an attempt to reduce the degree of conventionality of poetic languange: the words shall be grouped "come nascono" according to a mental or external reality and not to the laws of grammar. Syntax will thus supposedly gain a quality of meaningfulness, exactly like in the `veni, vidi, vici´-example for primary diagrammatic iconicity discussed on the iconicity home page.
Last but not least, the presence of iconic elements (other than the only too well-known onomatopoeia) in Marinetti´s poetics already in 1912 confirms the epistemological value of the `wide´ concept of iconicity, i.e. not limiting it to `imagic´ iconicity.
We do not, however, claim that the iconic features in Marinetti´s poetics were a reaction to the ideas of the futurist painters. Their contribution is by 1912 in our opinion limited to the idea of a `tecnical manifesto´ in itself. Only the programmatical texts of the following years will bear visible traces of their influence.
Christophe Georis, Université catholique de Louvain
Iconicity and the " Stile rappresentativo " : a few remarks taking Monteverdi as an example
" Madrigalism ", " stile rappresentativo ", " intelligibility of the text " : three terms which define the links between music and poetry according to three perspectives which are at times complementary, at times contrasting in the history of 16th and 17th Century music, especially regarding Monteverdian production. What understanding is there in the case of a sonnet put to music, knowing that the music will make a large part of the sonnet form imperceptible ? What links can be established between the musical iconicity (like madrigalism or " figuralism ") and poetic iconicity understood as mimesis (exophoric iconicity, W. Nöth) and also as a self justifying form (endophoric iconicity). The numerous synonyms of the expression" Stile rappresentativo " make the notions difficult to define : " recitar cantando ", " cantar recitando ", " monody ", " narrar cantando " (Pirrotta) and so on.
What is represented by this style, what links ca be established between the text and the score : symbolic, indexical or iconic relation ? And in case of iconic link : is it only imagic or also diagrammatic ? etc. More specifically, what does Monteverdi mean by " Oratione padrona del armonia et non serva " (Avvertimenti of the Scherzi musicali, 1607) ? What is covered by the term " oratione " : the content and/or the form ? In the case of vocal music, music is an act of reading, and at the same time a act of rewriting.
We will try to see how the notion put into place by the analysis of iconicity (and also semiology) can help to form, in a stimulating fashion, the questions relative to the links between music and poetry in the Monteverdian production.
Gian Paolo Giudicetti, Université catholique de Louvain
Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili and the number of paragraphs
Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili (1972) represent an interesting field for the investigation of a literary phenomenon such as iconicity. This text, composed by a frame in which Marco Polo and the emperor Kublay Kan discuss about power, reality and imagination and by the descriptions of 55 cities visited by Marco, is often an explicit meditation about signs, conventionality and iconicity. For instance, one of the 11 series in which these cities are divided is called Le città e i segni ('The cities and the signs').
Since an explicit meditation about signs and iconicity is present, a study about how the text makes use of iconic signification is especially fascinating. I will concentrate on the subdivision of Marco's descriptions of the cities into paragraphs. 29 out of 55 descriptions cities are divided into 2 or 4 paragraphs, 11 into 3. Others show either more divisions or are not divided at all.
55 cities, 11 series and 9 chapters: this implies that Le città invisibili contains a city-center, namely the third one described in the fifth chapter, Bauci. Nevertheless, Bauci is a place of absence. When the voyager arrives to Bauci, he doesn't see the city. Its inhabitants live on trees and pass their time "contemplating their absence on earth". And the text describing Bauci is subdivided into two paragraphs, which means that there is no central paragraph, no geometrical centre in Le città invisibili, but only two more or less symmetrical faces.
Is it possible to say that, in other description-towns of the book, two or four mean the absence of a centre and three its presence? How, more precisely, does the division in paragraphs function within single descriptions? Series like Le città e gli occhi ('The cities and the eyes' - there are two eyes and vision and form are at the centre) or description of towns like Laudomia, nearly symmetrically divided in a city of dead and a city of not yet born, will be analysed. The number of syllables of the cities' names - sometimes corresponding to the number of paragraphs - is not irrelevant.
Thus, one of the important topics of the book is symmetry, and another one is dialectics. Ralf Norrman's thesis about different kinds of symmetry will be discussed. To anticipate some of my conclusions, I may state that the number of even paragraphs coincides in great preponderance (28 out of 34 cases ) with non-euphoric texts (23 are disphoric, and 5 neutral) and that in Le città e i morti - 'The cities and the dead' - every description contains 2, 4 or 6 paragraphs.
Cathérine Grall, Univ. Amiens
Proposition de communication pour le colloque consacré à l'iconicité en langue et littérature de mars 2003
Dans une anthologie de nouvelles allemandes, publiée en 1871, le philologue et auteur Paul Heyse expose ce qui deviendra la très controversée "théorie du faucon" ; selon celle-ci, qui fait référence à la neuvième nouvelle de la cinquième journée du Décaméron de Boccace, une nouvelle se distinguerait par la mise en avant d'un objet qui définit sa silhouette. L'imprécision de l'argument explique autant ses critiques que son succès. On en retiendra l'idée que certains récits de fiction brefs se déploient autour d'un objet sémantiquement surdéterminé, qui peut prendre valeur d'image originelle. Je souhaite donc préciser analytiquement cette approche (générique, à l'origine) en proposant de voir derrière le "faucon" de Heyse une forme d'icône du texte et en posant la question des rapports liant cette image et la configuration formelle de l'œuvre - dont les théories romantiques disent qu'elle est révélée soudainement au lecteur, en fin d'histoire. Pour cela, en tant que comparatiste, je convoquerai des textes de différentes époques et de différentes cultures, au sein de la tradition occidentale (essentiellement des "classiques" et majoritairement des œuvres des XIXe et XXe siècles) ; je ferai probablement aussi allusion à la rhétorique, aux arts de la mémoire (et peut-être à la psychologie cognitive).
Pablo Isaac Halevi, Department of HebrewBen Gurion University, POB 653
Iconic correlations between phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic phenomena and their impact on the Parole-Langue dichotomy
Abstract: Traditional linguistics considers demonstratives as substitutes to nouns, which is why they are called 'pronouns'. A careful study of both categories in a typological perspective proves, however, that prototypical demonstratives tend to be phonologically monosyllabic; morphologically unanalyzable (even in root-based languages) but tending to create polysyllabic conglomerates (even in non composing languages); syntactically determined ; semantically void; pragmatically indispensable; universal in synchrony and primary in diachrony. They form a closed paradigm and are virtually never borrowed. There is a clear iconic relationship between all those parameters, which corresponds to the function of demonstratives: DEIXIS. Prototypical nouns, on the other hand, display inverse properties, showing an iconic correlation between their complex structure and late appearance at all levels which corresponds iconically to their function: CONCEPTUALISATION. It follows that demonstratives cannot be considered as mere substitutes of nouns (Dyonisus Thrax to Lyons), of late appearance in language (Port Royal, Benveniste), whose raison d'etre is to allow language to become discourse (Jabobson), and so on. But both categories display an extra-linguistic iconicity as well: deixis implies a reduced amount of brain calculation capacity and memory while conceptualisation needs much larger ones. Iconicity then points to deixis as the primary linguistic function and to deictics as the first linguistic devices. It is nouns that are pro-pronouns, not the other way round.
The second case-study is that of so-called topicalisation. The Prague approach holds that in order to pose an element as given information, the speaker extraposes it from a preexistent canonical syntactic construction. Here again, however, here is an iconic correlation between the different properties of the prototypical topic: syntactically it is determined and in first position; intonationally it has an ascending contour; prosodically it is followed by a pause, and pragmatically it refers to the element the speaker wishes to respond to/comment on. In all those senses, the topic behaves much like a question, which is the reason for the iconic correlation between all those elements. It follows that the Prague approach (Danes, etc.) is wrong. The topical element in absolute head of utterance has not been dislocated from a previous position: it has been placed there in the first place.
Both case studies - deictics and topics - prove that PAROLE is prior to LANGUE (inversely to the structuralist and, a fortiori, to the generativist dogmas). This induces certain ideas concerning the origin and nature of language.
Beate Hampe, Jena University (Germany), Institute of English and American Studies
Correspondence vs. Similarity in the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor
Similarity theories of various brands have dominated the theory of metaphor since Aristotle. Within the traditions inspired by his work, metaphor came to be regarded as a deviation of sorts from the literal use of language, which involves a substitution of a proper for an improper lexical element, and whose meaning can be rendered by a completely literal paraphrase.
Metaphor theory (MT) within cognitive linguistics has from the beginning rejected all these positions (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 1980). Instead, it focusses on stable conceptual cross-domain correspondences within the framework of a correspondence theory. Here, correlations arising from experience, rather than (perceived) similarities, came to be seen as central motivations of metaphorical thought, which, in turn, was considered to systematically motivate a huge range of linguistic expressions - both entrenched and novel ones, including many that would formerly have had to be regarded as 'literal'. Only more recently have similarity-based metaphor types surfaced again in cognitive typologies of metaphor (cf. Lakoff 1993/Grady 1999).
The discovery of 'primary' metaphors (PM), which are cross-domain correspondences directly grounded in experience and as such highly generic mappings, constituted one of last decade's major theoretical advances of metaphor theory and led to a thorough re-analysis of many established metaphorical mappings - among them the CONDUIT- and EVENT-STRUCTURE METAPHORS, as well as such wide-spread ones as IDEAS ARE FOOD or THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, all of which turned out to be of a more complex, or 'compound' kind (Grady et al. 1996, Grady 1997). In addition, the theory of 'Conceptual Integration', also 'Blending Theory' (BT) (Fauconnier/Turner 1998, 2002) has raised the question of whether the 'two-domain model' established by MT is not actually a special case of the 'many-space model' employed by BT. Remarkably enough, accounts of metaphor within the latter are often strongly analogy-based.
Consequently, the debate about the status of similarity (vs. correspondence) in an updated cognitive account of metaphor has been re-opened on a new plane. Building its argument on authentic everyday and literary examples from English and German, this paper aims at contributing to this debate by following up the subsequent questions:
- Is the criterion of cross-domain correspondence - though certainly critical to the notion of PM - by itself sufficient to account for the special, vivid 'feel' of metaphorical language? If not, what else is needed?
- Does their generic character suggest that PMs should be regarded as cognitive templates, which establish links between separate domains and then act as constraints in elaborations through processes of blending with further cognitive material?
- What can an investigation of the cognitive typology of metaphor from the perspective of similarity (broadly defined as including analogy/resemblance) contribute to answering these questions?
Beate Hampe & Doris Schönefeld, Universität Jena
Creative Syntax II': What corpus linguists see that other analysts may not
In our paper from the 3rd symposium (Hampe/Schönefeld, in press), we focussed on the kind of syntactic creativity that can be observed whenever a verb is used with an argument structure much more typical for another verb, as in: She bore them stupid. They feared him drowned. He supported them through the entrance door. They divided up the staircase. We argued that, in each such case (at least as long as it is novel and no entrenched default interpretations exist), the unusual, quasi borrowed argument structure serves as a (diagrammatic) iconic clue to the intended interpre-tation in that it triggers the retrieval of the verbal concept(s) most typically associated with the respective argument structure (and fitting the context). We suggested that the intended meaning of the creative expression is then arrived at through a concep-tual blend of the two verbal concepts thus activated.
Regarding the relative importance of particular verbs as inputs to the blending process (vs. the role of grammatical constructions), this iconicity-based approach to syntactic creativity contrasted to some extent with the construction-based explanation in Goldberg's model of "fusion" (e.g. Goldberg 1995, 1997). Within the theory of conceptual integration, "fusion" is treated as a form of blending, but Fauconnier/Turner (1996) are not fully explicit about the exact nature of the inputs to this blending process (i.e. whether these are typical verbs or constructions as syntactic templates). Though our approach avoided some of the problems that the competing one posed, the considerable common ground of and even overlap between both explanations also suggested that the main debate could not be finally resolved solely on the basis of the kind of data we had employed - consisting of a randomly collected set of examples, i.e. of isolated instances of the phenomenon of "creative" syntax from a narrow range of non-literary and literary written genres.
For our second paper on the topic, the empirical basis of our investigations has been considerably broadened: some of the verbs which figured in our examples were followed up in a mega-corpus consisting of the British National Corpus and the on-line component of the Bank of English (the Collins Online) - together making up more than 150 million words of a great variety of diverse discourse types of contem-porary spoken and written English. The corpus-based method enables us to exactly determine the typicality of our examples (in quantitative and qualitative terms), and thus to assess from a new perspective not only their degree of novelty/ entrenchment, but also the kind of creativity at work. On this basis - and with reference to relevant, recent results from (construction-based) research on language acquisition (Tomasello 2000a-c) - we will revisit our main issue regarding the role of single verbs (vs. constructions) as inputs to the blending process, as well as address some of the questions that were left open for further research, particularly some aspects of the productivity of the process under examination as well as its constraints.
Cécile Hayez, Université catholique de Louvain
Les logogrammes de Christian Dotremont : de l'illisible au visible
Les logogrammes de Christian Dotremont sont définis par lui comme "des resserrements de l'écriture où il n'y a plus de souci de lisibilité envers le spectateur" [je souligne]. Cette définition d'une expérience littéraire marginale, soulève au moins trois questions, auxquelles j'essaierai de répondre :
Johannes Helmbrecht, Universität Erfurt
Iconicity in Personal Pronouns and their Explanation
In the proposed paper I would like to investigate the question whether personal pronouns and the categories (such as person, number, gender, politeness) usually expressed in these forms show any iconic properties. It will be shown that there are non-arbitrary, iconic relationships between the structural coding of pronominal categories and the semantics of these categories. These diagrammatic iconic relations (cf. Haiman 1985; Nänny & Fischer 1999) are particular obvious with regard to politeness distinctions in pronouns (cf. also Haiman 1985:151-55). In a second step, it will be argued that iconicity cannot be an explanation of these facts. Instead, cognitive, pragmatic, and social factors have to be taken as the causal mechanisms of these diagrammatic relations. Structural iconicity in morphology in general and personal pronouns in particular is then explained as an epiphenomenon of these factors.
William J. Herlofsky, Professor, Nagoya Gakuin University (Japan)
Now You See It, Now You Don't. iMagic Iconicity and Spatial Mapping of Signed (JSL) Discourse
Sign languages, for a number of reasons, including their visual/ spatial modality, have a tendency to contain a hign proportion of visual/spatial iconicity. This visual/spatial iconicity exists not only in the shape of the manual signs themselves, but also in the locations, movements, and orientations of the signs. Combined with this manual-sign-related iconicity is the non-manual iconicity and imitative aspects of the facial expressions and bodily movement/ positioning blended into the role shifts, referential shifts, verb agreement and other forms of the more global spatial mapping utilized in the structuring and organization of the signing space of signed discourse. Perhaps because iconicity is so ubiquitous in sign languages, and because it comes in so many shapes and forms, much previous research on sign languages has tended to present somewhat disjointed and/or ambiguous descriptions of what constitutes manifestations of iconicity. An additional problem is caused by the fact that, expecially since Saussure, linguists have been led to believe that for a langauge to be a natural human language, the relationship between the form of a linguistic sign and its meaning must be arbitrary. This "belief" has resulted in a kind of schizo- phrenic behavior among sign language researchers, causing some to both recognize, and then later dismiss iconic phenomena for one reason or another. It is one of the main objectives of the present analysis to attempt to provide an alternative, Peircean approach to the analysis of sign language data that allows not only for the fact that sign languages are natural human languages, but also for the notion that iconicity not only exists in sign langauges, but is essential for some aspects of their formation. Through an analysis of the different mainifestations of visual/spatial iconicity in a brief (75 seconds) signed narrative about a rather late discovery of langauge by a Deaf signer of Japan Sign Language (JSL), it is illustrated how an understanding of the three elements of Peircean iconicity (image, diagram and metaphor) can aid in accomplishing this objective, and how the Peircean triadic notions of iconicity can help to unify the rather fractured descriptions of iconicity and signing space that have evolved over the past forty years of sign language research. The conclusion reached is threefold: that signing space is overwhelmingly iconic, that some types of iconic spatial mapping do not lose their iconicity with conventionalization, and that the organization of signing space can provide clues to the organization of mental representation related to the structuring of local signs and more global signed discourse.
Willem Hollmann, University of Manchester
The extended binding hierarchy and infinitival complementation in English causatives
This paper intends to account for the variation æ synchronic and diachronic æ between bare and to-infinitives in English causatives. While before the 18th C. causatives generally occurred with both infinitival modes, the PDE distribution is fixed, see e.g.:
Starting from the assumption that a formal difference corresponds to a functional difference (Bolinger 1977) I argue that the present situation and its diachronic development have an iconic basis.
The idea that the distribution of the two infinitival types is nonarbitrary is by itself not new. Duffley (1992) states that causatives with bare infinitives portray CONCURRENT causation (the causing and caused events are seen as simultaneous), while the to-infinitive signals ANTECEDENT causation (the two events are separated by a time interval). Fischer (1995, 1997) makes a similar suggestion with regard to ME verbs.
These suggestions are steps in the right direction, but they cannot be the whole story. Consider for instance ex. (1), above, where the secretary clearly only orders the coffee after her boss has instructed her. In view of this and other problems, Giv_n's (1980) multifaceted notion of BINDING seems more promising. Binding - the extent to which the higher and lower clauses are construed as a single integrated event - has the additional advantage that compared to the suggestions by Duffley and Fischer it fleshes out more fully Haiman's (1985) hypothesis that linguistic distance mirrors conceptual distance, since the latter is not restricted to temporal distance.
As it stands, the binding hierarchy for (implicative) causatives has two dimensions: INTENDED v. UNINTENDED causation and DIRECT v. MEDIATED causation. In order to account for the full range of data, however, I suggest that it be extended to include three more factors:
In terms of these parameters, causatives taking bare infinitives outscore the ones taking to-infinitives (in their prototypical uses). Historically, then, complementation came to be regulated in the way it did because of the constructions' differential (prototypical) binding properties. As to why this regulation occurred when it did, I hypothesise that there was a connection with the reversed grammaticalisation of to (Fischer 2000) - whereby it regained part of its old, purposive, semantics - and also with the rise of auxiliary verbs. Auxiliaries typically take bare infinitives and feature a high degree of binding with main verbs; their development may have had a knock-on effect on other infinitival constructions.
Peter Holz, University of Bremen
How do perfume advertisements smell? Some observations on the semiotic principle of iconicity in internet advertisements for perfumes for men
The human body plays neccessarily a crucial role in perfume advertising, since a perfume is applied to it. Thus, the body gets involved in olfactory communication.
The problem is: You cannot smell advertisements for perfumes - at least not on the internet, which I am concerned with. The olfactory impression which is supposed (or said) to be evoked by a certain odor must hence be represented via different sensory modalities.
In my talk I will be analyzing different perfume advertisements on the internet from the perspective of Peirceian semiotics; to be more precise: under the perspective of iconicity. The main point is to describe how advertisements try to create a non-olfactive, but visual an verbal relationship between the different constituents of (so called) olfactive semiosis:
Representamen: the human body (male in this case), the flacon (as container), the perfume (as a colored liquid)
Object: the odor (which is absent)
Interpretant: the concept of maskulinity
The principle of iconicity is - as I will show - a basic anf fruitful semiotic feature, that can frequently (but not always) be found in perfume advertisements.
Thomas Hunkeler, University of Zurich and Sankt Gallen
From sigh to sign: iconicity in early modern French poetry
The question of how to transform the sighs of the lover into love poetry is at the heart of the neo-petrarquism of poets like Maurice Scève, Louise Labé or Olivier de Magny. Based on the poetry of Petrarch on the one hand, on writings belonging to the realm of medicine and natural philosophy (Galien, Equicola, and the commentaries of Guido Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega") on the other, the love poets of the early French Renaissance try to give their poems an authetic touch by inscribing the sigh of the lover not only into the argument of their text, but also into the letters, words and rhymes they use.
Maurice Scève, for instance, strives to transform the matrix of the "blason anatomique" inherited from Clément Marot in order to give this form, which was originally used mostly in a satirical as well as crudely erotical sense, a more intimate touch. In his "Blason du souspir", Scève not only tries to explain the functioning of the sigh in a scientific way, but also imitates, in several passages of his poem, the sigh he is talking about. In Délie, his major collection of love poetry, which is closely modelled after Petrarch's Canzoniere, Scève no longer explains the sigh, but creates a long series of variations on Petrarch's "sospiri", while nevertheless trying to transform the Petrarchan topoi into a more personal, and destinctly French, voice.
Another interesting example is the poetic dialogue of the so-called "lovers" Louise Labé and Olivier de Magny. Indeed, the sonnets II of Labé's Euvres (1555) and LV of Magny's Souspirs (1557), whose first 8 verses are identical, constitue an astute game of question and answer, of sigh and counter-sigh. But wheras Labé desperately tries to find a voice of her own in the last verses of her poem, Magny tries on the contrary to imitate the Petrarchan model, thereby giving up every attempt to achieve a personal text. Magny, who explains the title of his collection of poetry by the fact that his poems "are full of sighs", does in fact aspire to imitate only his models, and not his feelings.
Barbara Kuhn, Münster / Venezia, Centro tedesco di studi veneziani
Narrative Structures and Iconicity in Yasmina Reza's Une Désolation (1999)
The short novel Une Désolation is Yasmina Reza's first text with the subtitle "roman", after the "récit" Hammerklavier (1997) and after the worldwide success with her texts written for the stage. What seems interesting in this dense and intricate text in the context of "iconicity" is the way in which the narrative structures of this novel are miming and / or creating the meaning expressed by the title with its surprising indefinite article. The novel is focussed on a "Je", is "pseudo-autobiographic", and just as in many autobiographies and also novels in the 20th century, there is no continuous plot, no uninterrupted "stream of consciousness", but only a series of blocks or "fragments" of memory, and it is the task of the reader to find or, more exactly, to construct the linkages between them. The whole text with its many repetitions is a nearly endless dialogue of a father with his son, but the son never answers, so that the structure of these "tentatives de dialogues" imitates the "dé-sol-ation" to which alludes the title.
In this sense, an analysis of the text based on the definition of iconicity could primarily show the different aspects of iconicity realised in this novel. Most important seems the concept of second degree diagrammatic iconicity, because just as in the example "veni, vidi, vici", the formal aspects reflect iconically the meaning expressed in the "monological dialogue" of the father. For example, the fact that there is no answer to any of the questions, makes, of course, the loneliness visible; the fact that the text repeats again and again the same sentences or episodes, is similar to the eternal turning around himself of the father; the form of the indirect discourse at different levels - the father tells his son how he tells a friend what another friend says to someone another and so on - renders evident both the fact that the father lives only in imagination and / or memory and the fact that there exists no immediate participation in his present time, but only past relations mediated through a lot of instances.
Based on this analysis of iconicity in a narrative text, Reza's Une Désolation could be - secondly - shown to be an example for the non-arbitrarity of language in a literary text: not only in poetry, where formal restrictions make obvious the motivation of each element of a text, but also in prose fiction, which presents the greatest liberty concerning structural or formal questions.
The paper will analyse these structures and forms confronting them with structures of contemporary (and former) novels and in this way examine the interplay, interference and interdependence of "form" and "meaning".
Massimo Leone, University of Siena, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, University of Fribourg
'Reality Effect and Iconicity' in the Representations of Violence: Fights, Battles, Death.
I shall focus on a theoretical problem, concerning the relation between the semiotic concept of 'iconicity' and the representations of violence. As regards the first element, I shall refer mainly to Greimas' acceptance of the term 'iconicity', which he defines mostly by contrast with the Peircian definition of the same word (definition which, according to some scholars, is based on a misinterpretation of Peirce's philosophy of signs), and which, in generative semiotics, becomes equivalent to the concept of 'referential illusion' (1). In the deductive-inductive methodology of semiotic analysis, on the one hand Greimas' concept of iconicity is suitable in order to define the cultural nature of the textual strategies and devices which represent violence, whilst, on the other hand, the analysis of such representations enables one to elucidate the subtle theoretical differences between a 'realistic' and a 'cultural' conception of iconicity. In particular, this profitable intersection between theory and analysis derives from the voyeuristic nature which is implied by most representations of violence. With reference to the most recent philosophical and phenomenological conceptions of violence, and, specifically, to Wolfgang Sofsky's Traktat über die Gewalt ('essay on violence') (2), I shall argue that, if on the one hand spectators' voyeurism requires the elimination of every enunciation mark from the texts which represent violence, on the other hand this 'reality effect' can be fully understood only in terms of verisimilitude, and not merely in terms of truth. In order to explain the dialectics between the voyeuristic need of 'reality' and the artificiality of texts, I shall take as an example 'snuff' movies and their filmic representations (I shall trace a brief history of this very particular filmic genre and refer mainly to Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar's film Thesis - 1996), because they evoke a very interesting theoretical issue: how is it possible to distinguish the 'real' 'violent death' from its representations? Is this a reasonable question in semiotics?
Following Greimas' acceptance of the term 'iconicity', I shall claim that such a question is metaphysical in the framework of semiotics, and that representations of violence and death must rather be analysed in relation to narrative and other textual devices of verisimilitude.
Barbara Lindlar, Fonds Raoul Hausmann au Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
"Optophonie" by Raoul Hausmann: The search for a "language of the senses"
Abstract: Raoul Hausmann is one of the founders and the most active member of the dada mouvement in Berlin (1918-1920). At this time he starts searching for a language, unencumbered by ideologie and fulfilling all senses. He invents the so-called "optophonie", a mixture of language, image and sound which he interprets in the form of literature (text), fine arts (paintings, prints) and lecture (sound), as well as by means of his body (free dance). Mainly during the time until his refuge in 1933 he develops the bases of this interdisciplinary art form.
Hausmann's "optophonie" is based on his traditional studies of the fine arts as well as his work as a graphic artist. He also works typographically on Art Nouveau and expressionist books. By means of the "art revolution" of dadaism he also devotes himself to dance und literature and in particular to the interdisciplinary art forms, like the "sound poetry", in which language is dissolved in its phonetic and visual essence. He invents "optophonetic" poems in which the letters remain legible elements of the language on the sound level and at the same time create an image. The dissolution of language serves the dadaists mainly to criticize the destructive ways of communication like war propaganda. However, Hausmann soon develops this dissolution into a method of creation in the sense of the "collage" principle: By destructing the old context (from sentences and words up to syllables and letters) free modes of expression are created, belonging to several genres, above all the so-called "grotesque dance" by means of which he creates his "sound poetry". Dancing - either with the entire body or just the face - he creates new sounds which are supposed to be independent from any traditions in language. He intentionally dances to Chinese and Arab music in order to free himself from the European context and find completely new modes of expression (movements, sounds).
In his theoretical texts Hausmann describes his Utopia of a new society which has free itself from old modes of communication which are encumbered by history. The individual develops an authentic way of articulating himself by means of sounds, movements and images arising from his body and thus makes it possible that a real exchange between the interior and the exterior, the familiar and the unfamiliar takes place. According to Hausmann only by doing this a true liberation from external constraints is possible which in his opinion was the cause of all social problems.
Christina Ljungberg, University of Zürich
Photographs in Narrative
From the very time of its invention, photography has been compared to both writing and drawing, only a much more authentic and a more 'real' representation of 'reality'. Henry Fox Talbot's calotype, the precursor to modern photography, seemed to represent the world in a new and revolutionary way by creating a 'real' contiguous relationship between the picture and its referent, owing to the traces that produced it (cf. Sonesson 1999). As Nancy Armstrong (1997: 7) notes, Talbot's invention did not only mark the beginning the proliferation of visual information so typical of our Western society, but it also converted this information into literature. What writers held out to readers by translating visual information of a particular kind was the prospect of putting them in touch with the world. Fiction thus provided readers with particular kinds of visual information which resulted in, on the one hand, that visual perception was made equivalent to knowledge, and, on the other, that visual information became a prerequisite for understanding a verbal narrative.
Photographs figure prominently in contemporary fictional texts, in which they function not only as tools for constant explorations of concepts as such 'reality' and 'authenticity' but also as structuring devices. In interacting with a written text, both the indexical and the iconic properties of the photographic sign thus come into play. Although the indexical properties of the photographic sign have often been emphasized (cf. Dubois 1983; Santaella 1998), most photographs also contain a strong iconic ingredient, which is what tells us what a particular photograph actually represents. According to C. S. Peirce, photographs function both as indices, because of their "physical connection" with their objects, i.e., the photochemical process which makes them correspond "point by point to nature", and as icons, since they "are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent" (CP 2.281). It is the iconic property of the photographic sign that creates a new 'reality' by its similarity to its object, an aspect which has become particularly prominent in digital photography with its ready access to virtual worlds. Thus, the iconic ingredient in photography relaunches the movement of semiosis, as it permits the construction of the text-image relation which constitutes the space of fiction.
My contribution will discuss the function of photographs in works by Paul Auster, Alfredo Bioy-Casares, Michael Ondaatje, Klaus Rifbjerg, and W.G. Sebald.
David Marron, Université Stendhal
Titre
Mon travail, que j'effectue sous la direction de Bernadette Bost, concerne les enjeux et les perspectives de la realtion musique/théâtre/scène dans la création contemporaine. Dnas ce cadre là, je suis amené à me pencher tout particulièrement sur les livrets d'opéra. À l'instar de nombreux textes de théâtre contemporain, nombre de ces livrets relèvent d'écritures fragmentaires. Elles se contemporain, nombre de ces livrets relèvent d'écritures fragmentaires. Elles se manifestent notamment par un traitement polyphonique du discours, par un mélange de langages et de caractères typographiques ou par un éclatement de la phrase et des groupes de textes, créant de la sorte des sortes d'archipels de phrase et des groupes de textes sur la page blanche du livret.
Pour une éventuelle communication, dans le cadre du colloque L 'ico-nicité en langue et littérature, je me propose d'étudier cet aspect fragmen-taire des livrets d'opéra contemporain et de théâtre musical à travers fragmentaire des livrets d'opéra contemporain et de théâtre musical à travers l'exemple précis de Vertiges, un Opéra/Théâtre de Jean-Pierre Drouet, Patrick Kermann et Christine Dormoy, commandé par l'Opéra de Bordeaux et créé en 2001. Ce livret de Patrick Kermann est intéressant à plus d'un titre car des archipels de textes y apparaissent, au fil des pages, de dimensions et de formes diverses, côte à côte ou se succédant. L'iconicité forte qui s'en dégage renvoie à un monde en chaos, un monde au bord du gouffre. Cette géographie textuelle met en évidence l'éclatement ultime de l'être face à lui-même et au monde dans met en évidence l'éclatement ultime de l'être face à lui-même et au monde dans lequel il essaie de vivre. Ces textes prennent une résonance particulière lorsque l'on sait que Patrick Kerrnann se suicida quelques semaines avant les premières représentations.
Soro Maria Maslanka, Universita Jagellonica di Cracovia
"Iconicity" dans l'Enfer de Dante
La presente communicazione ha come obiettivo individuare ed esaminarei i piu rilevanti aspetti della iconicita nell'Inferno di Dante. Limitandomi alla prima cantica sono ben consapevole della presenza notevole di questa dimensione in tutto il poema. Proprio in ragione della ricchezza del materiale analitico ho deciso di limitare la ricerca alla cantica piu conosciuta, la cui visione si presenta come piu "afferrabile con i sensi". Anzittutto e importante fare qui una distinzione tra i segni puramente simbolici (o allegorici) e quelli di tipo iconico, anche se talvolta si ha a che fare con una sovrapposizione dei due, come nel caso della famosa "scritta morta" sulla porta dell'inferno od di alcune immagini poetiche, quelle p. e. in cui viene coinvolta la legge del contrappasso. Nell'"Inferno" si possono ritrovare i due tipi di segni iconici: sia "iconic image" che "iconic diagram". La rappresentazione della suddetta legge, che commisura simbolicamente la pena al genere e alla gravita della colpa commessa, puo diventare un vero e proprio segno visivo, veicolo di un senso profondo, talvolta ambiguo, di un determinato personaggio o dell'intero episodio. In questo senso e molto significativa, tra le altre, l'immagine della sorte dei suicidi dopo il Giudizio Universale nel c. XIII, quella cioe degli uomini-alberi con i loro corpi appesi agli alberi stessi." L'iconicita diventa nei simili casi uno strumento dell'interpretazione della realta. "L'iconic image" e anche ben presente a livello linguistico, quello dell'onomatopea i cui casi piu interessanti saranno oggettodell'analisi.L'iconicita richiede una particolare attenzione, quando e di tipo intertestuale. Certi motivi letterari, presenti nelle similitudini (tratti p. e. dalle Metamorfosi di Ovidio) possono eesere interpretati come segni iconici, dove l'analogia costituisce talvolta solo il punto di partenza per ribadire meglio il contrasto tra il "vecchio" e il "nuovo" senso, svuotando diffatti il primo del suo significato. Da prendere in considerazione sarebbe anche il livello retorico con gli esempi dei "ritratti retorici", come quello, forse il piu famoso, di Pier della Vigna. Per quanto riguarda "iconic diagram" ci sono in Dante dei casi interessantissimi del simbolismo fonologico e delle corrispondenze tra il ritmo e il senso di alcuni versi o di alcune strutture sintattiche.
Keiko Masuda, Kansai Gaidai University
A cat goes bow-wow and a dog goes meow?
A study using birdcalls and their linguistic representations has pointed out that the Front Cavity Resonance (FCR) of the representations tracks the main component of the birdcalls (Masuda forthcoming). This might be, however, specific to birdcalls, which are quite high in pitch and consist of relatively simple components. As such, this might not be applicable to linguistic representations of non-linguistic sounds in general. This paper attempts to apply the FCR theory to sounds of animals, which are relatively more complicated. The analysis showed revealed that the FCR theory was supported in all of the cases of the animal sounds. Another important observation was that when the energy concentration trajectory of the animal sound is static and there is more than one formant, the frequency distribution of the formants seems to influence the choice of vowels. Selecting consonants seems to be more complicated than it seems to be for birdcalls and has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
The paper also attempts a preliminary cross-linguistic investigation. Many people wonder why a dog barks differently in other languages, for instance. From the analysis, at least some tendencies and underlying basic principle were observed in relation to the selection of both vowels and consonants, although the structure of the representation and selection of individual phonemes are regulated by and dependent on the phonological system of each language. It may therefore be said that the shape of a linguistic representation or an imitative expression of a non-linguistic sound (at least of an animate non-linguistic sound) is determined according to the FCR of each phoneme. This provides a starting point for a potentially universal theory of the principles of sound symbolism, which can explain the relationship between a sound in the world and its imitation using the human vocal mechanism.
Paul Georg Meyer, University of Aachen
From hypothesis via observation to fact: handling data and generalisations in academic discourse
This paper will take up an observation first made by the sociologist Latour (1987, 25ff.) and try to validate it using data from English written academic discourse. The more a certain state of affairs put forward as a hypothesis or observation becomes established as a fact, the more deeply syntactically embedded and the more condensed its linguistic representation will become in academic discourse. The decisive factor in this 'scale of factualness', however, is not, as Latour hypothesised, the factualness of the proposition in question, but constraints arising from the need for its discursive handling in an economic way. This also explains the often-deplored tendency towards a nominal style in academic discourse. It arises from the need to have a 'handy' linguistic form available when it comes to discussing hypotheses, observations and results in academic discourse.
This can be shown most clearly in the use of the stem observ- in academic discourse. The semantics of observe always implies some reservations about the factualness of observations. Nevertheless it may occur in the whole range of different morphological forms and syntactic environments in which other verbs of coming to know occur in academic texts. Its finite verbal forms are used to focus on the process of observation, mentioning along with it either the object of observation (atelic) (examples are from from the LOB corpus with reference numbers given):
he observed the Hastings Sands ( Wealden ) above the Purbeck beds near Dinton |SJ11|P9
or its results (telic):
the following stages were observed |SJ23|P53
The focus shifts slightly when the verb form is embedded in a finite subordinate clause:
... they were successively out of phase by about one chord length when the ends of the rotor blades were observed |SJ73|P16
If the subordination becomes non-finite, the result of the observation is clearly in focus and the use of observespeels out a condition on its truth:
observed underwater, two zones of differing behavior were recognized : |SJ06|P24
Participles used as premodifying attributes show the result of the observation as a semi-fact that is worth considering:
the curve of observed activity plotted against absorber thickness is shown in figure 2 . |SJ04|P2
But it must still be weighed against theoretically based expectations:
this expected median raw score was then compared with the observedmedian raw score . |SJ38|P10
The nominalisation finally allows academic writers to handle observations in an economic way, that is, to base further conclusions on them, to argue about method, etc.:
this observation shows that means and medians do not necessarily agree in the conclusions they yield . |SJ19|P53
most of the material concerning kinship in the Vale was obtained by standard anthropological procedures: the collection of genealogies , unstructured interviews with individual informants, and participant observation .|SJ30|P19
Héléna Mialon-Pontes, Université Lyon 2
De l'iconicité comme critique du visible et exigence du visuel dans l'écriture de Valère Novarina - "l'interdit de la représentation" et "l'incarnation du verbe" ou comment faire une croix sur l'homme.
"Il y a qui surplombe tous mes livres, quelque chose comme l'interdit de la représentation." Valère Novarina
Il peut sembler pour le moins aberrant de proposer une étude sur l'iconicité à partir de cette injonction extrême de l'interdit de la représentation. Pourtant, comme le défend Dominique Chateau dans Le Bouclier d'Achille, Théorie de l'iconicité, "C'est comme acte de transformation, et non comme référent objectif ou mental, comme production du visible plutôt que comme renvoi au visible, que l'iconicité participe de l'intérêt artistique". En effet, c'est rarement l'adhésion au système représentatif normé qui nous touche mais sa mise en branle, le déchirement des certitudes figuratives, la trouée faite dans la chaîne associative, le chaos porté dans l'écran de la réalité. Il n'est donc pas aberrant d'aborder l'iconicité depuis l'interdit de la représentation puisque c'est le refus même, l'aberration, l'irrégularité qui constituent la densité et la complexité de la mise en présence iconique. Penser l'iconicité c'est analyser précisément cette lutte contre l'anesthésie que provoque irrémédiablement le système reproductif du régime mimétique de la langue contractuelle et de la réalité totalisante, totalitaire qu'elle installe. Le caractère iconique de l'image est ce par quoi cette image se fait critique de l'image et critique de la réalité. L'iconicité est donc bien critique du visible, "exigence du visuel". Ainsi, après avoir affirmé : "Il faut être voyant", Arthur Rimbaud ajoute : "Il [le voyant] devient entre tous le grand malade (...) le grand maudit": l'artiste que la réalité et la langue communément partagées indisposent, condamnent, est celui qui, pour accéder aux "visions", à "l'inconnu", aux "choses inouïes et innommables", porte atteinte précisément au système représentatif de cette langue, de cette réalité en la disposant mal, en la disant mal. Le caractère iconique n'est pas réplique, mais donne la réplique. Souvenons-nous de l'éponge rageuse et écumante du peintre Apelle qui, jetée contre le tableau, donnait vie à la vue de l'écume, faisait surgir la beauté. Il s'agit non pas de voir mais de voir en-deçà, la matière, pour voir au-delà, l'immatérielle ouverture du réel aux sens. Il s'agit de rendre à l'iconicité une de ses plus importantes et fascinantes caractéristiques : celle d'abîmer - tout à la fois défaire la réalité, inquiéter le visible du spectateur, l'absorber, être sa propre mise en abyme. Notre travail consistera donc à rentrer non plus dans le "ut pictura poesis" mais le "ut fictura poesis" - cette effraction que nous nous permettons à l'égard de la citation est un moyen de signifier la "mal façon" (le mal dire et mal disposé qu'évoquait Rimbaud, ou le "mal vu", "mal dit" de Beckett) de l'écriture poétique qui est en oeuvre dans le façonnement du matériau. Il s'agit donc d'analyser les aberrations, les irrégularités qui réapparaissent dans le corps de l'oeuvre comme un perpétuel travail de détournement du système représentatif conventionnel, comme un retournement de l'écriture sur elle-même.
Chez Valère Novarina, poète, dramaturge, peintre, il y a une volonté thaumaturgique: ne pas donner à voir, reproduire, le visible constitué, mais, ce qui est bien davantage que le simple refus d'une réalité référente, donner vue et vie à l'invu, rendre visible, présent cet autre monde que constitue la matière et l'imaginaire de la création. Donner le souffle à la matière, donner un nouveau souffle au visible, à l'écriture. Incarner ce qu'ils cachent, le mystère de leur création. C'est pourquoi nous nous proposons d'analyser, dans un premier temps, le régime iconique et l'inquiétude du visible qu'entraînent la ritournelle "la lumière nuit" et son corrolaire "vue négative", plus particulièrement dans Pendant la matière, Devant la parole et L'Origine rouge, dans laquelle elle met en présence de la déprésentation de la figure de l'homme, puis, dans un deuxième temps, nous questionnerons la dimension iconique de la croix et du "V.N." dans Devant la parole, leur pluri-visibilité, tant du point de vue de la résurgence de leur apparition dans le corps de l'écriture que de leur capacité à incarner plusieurs possibles visuels. Cette étude devrait nous permettre d'inscrire l'oeuvre de Valère Novarina dans le prolongement du débat entre l'art et la théologie sur la ressemblance et la dissemblance de l'icône, lui donner donc une inflexion contemporaine, de même qu'elle permet de ressaisir l'enjeu de l'iconicité par ce qui fut sa principale source théorique.
Philippe Monneret, Université de Bourgogne - Dijon
Relative Motivation in G. Guillaume's Theory
Saussure's theory about the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is smoothened within his approach of the Cours de linguistique générale by the notion of "relative motivation". Nevertheless, in spite of his clear assertions concerning the limitations that the relative motivation induce to the arbitrariness of the sign, the relation between these two aspects of the linguistic semiology is never explicitly rendered.
For Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), a French linguist whose findings have engaged numerous works around the sign motivation theory, the relative motivation issue is expanded to more extensive meaning as compared to Saussure's linguistics. We are going to address the analytical pattern of the French verb aller as proposed by Gustave Guillaume. His theory shows that the roots repartition of this verb (v-, all-, ir-) is not made at random. This approach will help us redefine the relation between the arbitrariness and the motivation of the sign. Consequently, we will propose a scale of arbitrariness.
Judith Munat, University of Pisa
Phraseological units and metaphors as icons in Henry James' The Sacred Fount
This study will focus on the iconicity of phraseological units (elsewhere referred to as lexical phrases, prefabricated language, etc.) and of metaphors occurring in Henry James' novel, The Sacred Fount.
The category of phraseological units comprises a wide variety of structural and functional types, the most commonly-occurring being the lexical categories of compounds and the phrasal categories of idioms and similes. There also exists a vast array of fixed clausal structures, including routine social formulae and attitudinal markers as well as a variety of clichés, commonplaces, slogans, proverbs, quotations, catch phrases, etc.
A good number of these units are figurations or conventionalised metaphors in which the parallelism between object and 'something else' has become transparent. so that they are, according to Hiraga (1994:17), felt to be literal. These are the so-called time-worn or dead metaphors which the norms of good style advise us to avoid but which, in effect, "pervade everyday language" (Radwa_ska-Williams, 1994:35) and which may "become reactivated at any time." Thus the dividing line between these stale clichés and other, novel metaphors is tenuous, and determined mainly by the fact that this latter group, due to the originality of the associations made, requires that the listener 'discover' the intended interpretation among the multiple possible meanings. Therefore, conceptually unique or novel metaphors are included in our study given their essential similarity with figurative or idiomatic fixed expressions. It is my contention that many of the literal fixed expressions present in James' novel are indices and, further, that both the idiomatic expressions, whether viewed as conceptually-determined or as dead metaphors (see Gibbs, 1995:104), as well as the novel metaphors employed by James, are also instances of iconic representation. In this latter case, however, iconicity is at a more abstract level, in that the images contained in the metaphors point to a hidden or latent parallelism between the target and source domains that indicates some sort of symbolic motivation. (Fuertes-Olivera et al, 1998:56) In order to verify this hypothesis, I propose to examine the numerous lexicalized strings and novel metaphors which occur in James' novel.
Max Nänny, University of Zürich
Iconic Uses of Rhyme
Generally, rhyme is seen as a decorative device of poetry that may also have mnemonic functions. Now, my paper tries to show that beyond those traditional functions rhyme may assume a variety of iconic tasks. Basing my paper on selected poetic texts mainly in English from the Renaissance to the present, I shall study how a rhyme may express absolute unity or identity; how a line ending on a non-rhyme may denote singularity or too much liberty; how a wrong rhyme indicates inaccuracy; how off-rhymes echo dissonance or disorder; how a monotonous series of rhymes points to a lack of culture; and how a rhyme recurring throughout a poem may form an icon of constancy. Furthermore, I shall investigate the more indirectly iconic practice of exploiting masculine vs. feminine rhymes for semantic purposes, especially in love poetry.
I shall also look at rhyme schemes. The order of conventional or formal schemes may iconically reinforce harmony, order or precision, whereas a disarranged scheme may suggest disorder, destruction or disharmony. The change-over from one to the other within a poem may reflect the notion of change in general, but equally an opening up or loosening up or break-up, or even uncertainty. I shall give some consideration to the iconicity of embracing rhymes and also study the iconic function of some couplet rhymes and of triplet rhymes within a context of heroic couplets. In addition, I shall scrutinise the iconic uses of chiastically arranged rhymes.
Chiara Nannicini, Paris XII
L'iconicité dans Malina de Bachmann et dans La vie mode d'emploi de Perec
L'étude sur les aspects multiformes des années 70 chez certains auteurs comporte aussi l'étude des procédés visuels, graphiques et typographiques. En particulier, une insertion graphique qui ne se présente pas comme illustration à un texte, mais qui en revanche se manifeste à l'intérieur du texte romanesque. Cela comporte une participation à la syntaxe de la phrase, ainsi qu'au contenu du récit en question. Dans ce sens, on rendra compte des insertions de partitions musicales dans Malina d'Ingeborg Bachmann (1971) et de quelques insertions, parmi les nombreuses virtuosités graphiques dans La vie mode d'emploi de Georges Perec (1978), notamment la reproduction d'un échiquier et d'une grille de mots croisés. Après une description initiale de ces phénomènes, on pourra même souligner la différence entre les partitions de Malina et le modèle constitué par les insertions musicales de Fräulein Else, d'Arthur Schnitzler. De même pour Georges Perec, ces introductions graphiques laissent apercevoir une longue tradition (Rabelais, Sterne), mais apportent une expérience nouvelle. Puisant à des sources extérieures au domaine littéraire, ces "images narrées" ou "narrations illustrées" ont comme point commun de marquer une nette coupure du récit tout en assurant la fluidité du discours. Ainsi, malgré son étonnante nouveauté, cet usage n'est qu'une des nombreuses variantes d'écriture que le narrateur contemporain introduit dans son oeuvre.
Eva Maria Orth, Universität Jena
The Iconic Representation of Consciousness in Poetry and Narrative Fiction
The paper explores formal aspects of the representation of consciousness in poetry and narrative fiction. It focuses on the relation of form and style of particular texts and the represented mental processes and states of feeling.
Rather than discussing emotional states or the nature of consciousness, the investigated texts aim at presenting mental processes 'as they are'. To achieve this aim, authors engage in the paradoxical endeavour of reproducing verbally what is not necessarily verbal in nature. Formal and stylistic means here serve to express what is understood as formally characteristic of the mind; the literary representation of consciousness is a (re-)creation of the structures of thought.
Examples range from English Renaissance poetry to modernist narrative. What connects such seemingly disparate writers as Thomas Wyatt ("I find no peace and all my war is done ...") and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) is the attempt at an immediate representation of individual experience through formal equivalents of this experience. Woolf herself stressed the aspect of form ('order', 'pattern') in her famous essay "Modern Fiction": "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."
The paper looks at how the experience of reality is given shape through a variety of formal means that range from the syntax to narrative style.
Luiza Palanciuc, Université de Bucarest, EHESS Paris
"Toute pensée est en signes". L'iconicité: archéologie d'unconcept
Les dispositifs de l'autonomisation sémiotique et la réflexion sur les formes symboliques nourrie de post-kantisme nous conduisent à nous interroger sur les manières d'envisager l'accumulation savante des théories du signe et les articulations conceptuelles qui gravitent autour de ces théories. Est-il possible, dans le jeu des différences, des écarts ou autres décalages à l'intérieur des théories linguistiques, de saisir l'espace valide d'une archéologie de la notion d'iconicité ? Selon quel régime, quel effet de bascule, peut-on considérer que c'est un même discours qui se répète chez Peirce ou chez Wittgenstein ? Poser ces questions signifie en fait poser le problème de l'assomption de la sémiotique, et, à travers elle, de la phanéroscopie et de la reconstruction de tout " jeu de langage " wittgensteinien sur le modèle de la maxime peircienne : "toute pensée est en signes ". Néanmoins, un renversement de perspective a déjà eu lieu : alors que Peirce prend les symboles pour point de départ, afin de parvenir aux icônes, Wittgenstein est, dès le début, sur une position iconique, et la thèse sur l'iconicité des jeux de langage, c'est-à-dire se manifestant " par eux-mêmes ", y trouve ainsi sa preuve la plus forte. En ce sens, le jeu de langage wittgensteinien doit donc être pris iconiquement, et l'iconicité est, du même coup, logiquement première dans le processus de reconstruction du langage. Le caractère public de toute pensée, comme le rejet de tout ego fondateur, sont sans doute des points de convergence entre les deux auteurs. Mais c'est précisément autour de la notion d'iconicité qu'une comparaison entre les deux pourrait éventuellement être articulée, et une solution de continuité être trouvée, malgré l'inversement de la priorité entre l'icône et le symbole.
Guido Pedrojetta, Université catholique de Fribourg
La peinture dans les mots: l'étude des liens expressifs, entre " mot " et " image ", dans l'œuvre critique de Giovanni Pozzi (1923-2002)
Les premières contributions de cet auteur sur le message mixte bien particulier que représentent les " imprese " (survivant aujourd'hui, en tant qu' " objet " précieux, dans la collection splendide des " pale " de l'Académie florentine de la Crusca) remontent aux années Cinquante : elles portaient sur la " culture figurative " d'un capucin de Côme, pratiquement oublié à l'époque, Emmanuele Orchi, auteur d'un recueil de sermons baroquisants. Dès lors, le chemin scientifique de Giovanni Pozzi n'a jamais cessé de croiser la voie intrigante et fascinante des signes artistiques s'exprimant par l'addition de mots et d'images. Par ailleurs, sa fidélité devait déboucher en la réédition (1964) du chef d'œuvre de la typographie italienne entre Humanisme et Renaissance, l'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venise 1499) de Francesco Colonna : un roman bien singulier, mobilisant dans sa textualité une mixture incroyable de latin et de vulgaire, italien et patois, d'images et de symboles peints. Sur le plan spéculatif (accompagné de la lecture de textes et/ou de tableaux), cette même fidélité a trouvé son expression systématique en quelques volumes réputés et couronnés, au titre parlant, qui révélaient un richesse de la littérature ancienne et moderne, trop souvent dispersée : La parola dipinta (1981), Poesia per gioco (1984), Un'antifona dipinta (1987), Sull'orlo del visibile parlare (1993). La mise en relief du travail très long et très fouillé de Giovanni Pozzi dans ce domaine bien spécialisé (il l' a cultivé au long d'un demi-siècle) nous conseille de regrouper la présentation des résultats sous trois chapitres différents, qui seront illustrés avec l'appui de projections. Tout d'abord, les fondements théoriques de la matière, avec des applications non seulement à la littérature italienne, mais aussi aux carmina figurata du Moyen-âge latin (Raban Maure) et à ceux de la littérature française ancienne et moderne (Rabelais ou Apollinaire, avec ses Calligrammes) ; et il en va de même pour l'histoire culturelle et des mentalités (l'image du cœur). Vient ensuite l'édition de " textes " écrits ou peints, tels le Quaresimale [anthologie] de Orchi et le Songe de Poliphile ou (très récemment), les tableaux " pour grâce reçue ", conservés dans sa terre d'origine (L'ex voto dipinto nel Ticino, Bellinzona 1999). En dernier lieu, un aperçu sur les auteurs italiens qui auront sollicité chez lui une lecture figurée révélatrice: par exemple, les formes géométriques expressives, identifiées à l'intérieur du très long poème d'Adone (1623), ou les images anthropomorphes, émergeant d'un vers de Tommaso Stigliani (1573-1651), et bien d'autres encore.
Claus Pusch, Universität freiburg
How iconic or counter-iconic is the Romance imperative?
The grammatical status of the imperative has long been - and still is - a challenge for both formally and functionally oriented linguists. Although an 'imperative' in the sense of some verbal form used to express commands (and, less frequently, prohibitions) may be identified in many languages, the imperative paradigm uses to be deficient and incomplete, as compared to other verbal paradigms of e.g. tense or mood, and highly suppletive. Due to these structural deficiencies, the mere existence of an imperative paradigm may be questioned; furthermore, imperative forms or constructions display a considerable cross-linguistic variation (cf. Xrakovskij ed. 2001 for a recent overview). But not only are the formal properties of imperatives quite puzzling; also its categorial status is still object of controversy. Whereas traditional grammarians use to group the imperative, together with the indicative and the subjunctive, among the category of mood, others reject its status as an independent mood or consider the imperative as a kind of speech act or sentence type (cf. e.g. Gysi 1997: 19-40 concerning the case of Spanish).
Also within iconicity-oriented approaches to language form and function, the imperative has received different and heterogeneous treatments. As 'true' imperative forms are characterized, in many languages, by a rather poor morphology, the imperative has been considered as an instance of counter-iconicity, specifically if discourse frequency is taken into account, with the imperative as a comparatively infrequent category being a highly unmarked ("merkmallos") one. But even in approaches that dispense with discourse frequency as a decisive criterion, such as Natural Morphology in Mayerthaler's (1981) conception, the imperative is acknowledged as being problematic, e.g. due to the apparent violation of the markedness asymmetry relation that holds between the 1st and the 2nd person (or between the 3rd and the 2nd person in the Benveniste tradition), the latter being, for obvious pragmatic reasons, the most prominent and most elaborate in imperative paradigms. Other proponents of Natural Morphology, however, consider poor imperative morphology such as the incompatibility, in many languages, with subject clitics to be an iconically motivated expression of the weak modal status of the imperative (cf. Kilano-Schoch 1988: 195). So both as compared to the verbal categorial system as a whole and within the imperative paradigm - if such a paradigm may be identified - the status of imperatives in iconicity and naturalness terms remains unclear and controversial.
The aim of my talk will be to analyze the imperative forms and constructions of a specific language group, the Romance languages, in the light of these controversial and puzzling issues. Romance is well suited for such a contrastive analysis as it contains a large array of different formal expressions of both positive and negative imperatives, ranging from 'true' and suppletive synthetic forms to infinitives, periphrastic constructions and constructions based on preverbal or sentence-initial particles (cf. Zanuttini 1997: 105-154 for various data). Special emphasis will be given to the distinction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic iconicity (as used, e.g., by Krug 2001).
Geneviève Roland, Université catholique de Louvain
Iconicité dans la poésie montalienne. Lecture de Corno inglese et repérage des récurrences caractéristiques de la macrostructure des Accordi.
Toute l'œuvre poétique d'Eugenio Montale est caractérisée par un idéal exigeant et désespéré ; à savoir, la tentative de rejoindre une communication parfaite, dont l'instrument ne serait autre que le langage. En témoignent, par exemple, les premières recherches expérimentales du poète ligure autour de l'" objet ". Convaincu qu'une œuvre d'art ne puisse trouver son véritable accomplissement que lorsqu'elle échappe à l'auteur en devenant à ses yeux même un " objet ", Montale affirme que la littérature ne devrait pas se contenter d'imiter les données du monde réel et qu'il conviendrait plutôt de les transposer à travers une évocation capable de les suggérer.
Ce présupposé scriptural est d'une importance capitale pour celui qui s'intéresse à l'iconicité puisqu'il prouve que, dès ses débuts, le poète a toujours volontairement privilégié la formalisation des projections mentales qui sont suggérées par l'écriture. D'autre part, on se rend compte que Montale a toujours été conscient du caractère aléatoire de ces projections humaines et que celles-ci peuvent être interprétée différemment en fonction de la sensibilité du lecteur.
Aussi, dans ce " paper ", nous tenterons de montrer jusqu'à quel point certains procédés formels, en se conjuguant, peuvent construire une " toile de fond " capable d'orienter toute l'interprétation poétique et donner vie à de nombreux réseaux sémantiques. Pour ce faire, on proposera une étude détaillée de certaines stratégies iconiques contenues dans Corno inglese (métrique, typographie, jeux phoniques, itérations, syntaxe). Une fois mise en relief, cette poésie nous permettra ensuite non seulement d'identifier, grâce aux récurrences, une part de la construction macrostructurale de la série Accordi, mais aussi certaines constantes thématiques qui se retrouvent dans l'œuvre du " Primo Montale ", étant donné que Corno inglese a été inséré plus tard par le poète dans la session Movimenti du recueil Ossi di seppia.
André Rousseau, University of Lille 3
La double iconicité dans l'ordre des éléments des langues naturelles
Cette étude repose sur un examen approfondi et minutieux, appliqué à plusieurs types de langues, de la succession des éléments dans les langues naturelles. En effet, cet ordre n'est pas libre (i.e. indifférent), ni codifié par des règles formelles ? comme on l'on trop longtemps enseigné.
A y regarder de près, la succession des éléments quels qu'ils soient (groupes, mots, auxiliaires, morphèmes, etc.) en allemand moderne par exemple, se répartit, dans l'ordre de base, sur deux volets à partir de la la base verbale lexicale, qui occupe la position centrale: le volet référentiel à gauche et le volet catégoriel ou énonciatif à droite:
Unter diesen Umständen das Haus dem Meistbietenden
VERKAUFT worden sein musse.
Une étude fine et méticuleuse du volet catégoriel montre que les éléments se rangent dans un ordre parfaitement calculé, révélateur et iconique des opérations mentales sous?jacentes: propriétés objectives d'abord (voix et phase), puis propriétés subjectives (modalité et temps), enfin propriétés interlocutoires ou communicatives (mode et personne).
Ce n'est pas un hasard si la même iconicité se retrouve dans l'ordre des adjectifs du groupe nominal.
La séquence référentielle, exprimant le contenu ou " dictura", répond à une tout autre iconicité: celle qui reflète la situation d'énonciation ou, plus exactement, la vision que veut en transmettre le locuteur. Cette séquence possède trois caractéristiques:
La reconnaissance de cette double iconicité permet de jeter un regard neuf sur la question tant rebattue (et mal formulée) de l' "ordre des mots", en montrant que tout locuteur est, dans l'exercice du langage, d'un côté soumis à la contrainte incontournable des opérations mentales mais qu'il possède aussi la latitude de construire comme il la perçoit l'organisation du signifié.
Astrid Ruffa, Université de Lausanne
Dalí théoricien, peintre et écrivain surréaliste : pour un automatisme psychique placé sous le signe de l'icône
Aborder Dalí par le biais de l'iconicité, c'est se donner la chance de mettre en évidence l'originalité de la contribution du peintre au tournant des années 30 au sein du groupe surréaliste en ce qui concerne la théorie et la pratique de l'automatisme.
Du point de vue sémiotique, les deux grandes figures du surréalisme placent au cœur de leurs conceptions théoriques un paradigme tout à fait différent. Breton, en élaborant tout au long des années 20 son modèle de " pensée subconsciente " et d' " écriture automatique ", s'appuie essentiellement sur le signe de type indiciel (d'après la terminologie de Peirce) : l'accent est mis sur les moments d'intensité émotive qui sont vécus par un sujet se transformant en réceptacle de la parole intérieure et dont l'œuvre surréaliste témoigne ; d'où l'écriture de textes considérés comme des " indices " authentifiant l'événement-avènement et renvoyant, par un lien de contiguïté, à l'expérience psychique de cette " descente vertigineuse en [soi] ". Dalí, par contre, tout en intégrant la vision bretonienne, ouvre une voie d'exploration nouvelle en faisant appel à un régime de type iconique et symbolique. Pour penser l'automatisme psychique, il adopte comme point de départ la figuration picturale considérée comme un espace iconique où le lien habituel entre " chose " et " representamen " est mis en cause : une référence nouvelle, informée par le désir, se révèle par un rapprochement de formes analogues renvoyant à des objets différents. D'abord peintre et ensuite écrivain, en élaborant sa méthode paranoïaque-critique, Dalí privilégie non pas un " flux verbal " mais un type de " regard " et souligne la dimension visuelle ainsi que le caractère instantané de la pensée intérieure : celle-ci se fait active, a un caractère démiurgique et s'applique à la réalité extérieure qu'elle réinvente, déchiffre et rend fantasmatique sous le signe d'analogies formelles. Or, l'iconicité n'est pas seulement à la base de l'élaboration conceptuelle de la méthode paranoïaque-critique, mais elle investit aussi les tableaux daliniens qui ne cessent de jouer sur l'ambiguïté et la reconnaissance différée des images, ainsi que les écrits théoriques et littéraires du peintre où une idée obsédante s'impose de manière objective par la reproduction systématique d'un même ordre de relation.
Pour interroger les différentes modalités d'utilisation du concept d'iconicité, je me propose donc, dans un premier temps, de souligner le changement de paradigme sémiotique opéré par Dalí par rapport à Breton, au niveau théorique. Dans un deuxième temps, en prenant appui sur quelques textes manifestaires comme " L'âne pourri ", " La chèvre sanitaire " ainsi que sur le tableau et poème " La métamorphose de Narcisse" , j'aimerais illustrer la façon dont le peintre catalan manipule et met en œuvre la forme iconique dans des domaines aussi différents que celui pictural et scripturaire.
Dalí semble finalement mettre en place une véritable école du regard qui mérite d'être fréquentée : de par la forme iconique, le peintre expérimente une nouvelle structure de conscience et nous donne en partage un monde réinventé, tout à fait vérifiable.
Isabella Sardo, Université catholique de Louvain
Iconicity and titles: an example from Pirandello.
What are the consequences on the reading act when the iconic power of a text is concentrated in its title? We examine this aspect of the iconicity of literary texts starting from a remarkable example in Italian literature: the original title "Si Gira!" of a pirandellian novel, and its successive changes in following editions and in translations to other languages.
The image conveyed by the title "Si Gira!" (we are turning) is circular, passive and endless. It finds a perfect "pendant" in the narrative structure of the plot, equally circular and lacking a strong subject.
The successive title change into "Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio" ( notebooks of Serafino Gubbio) brings about the parallel change in the iconic image of the title and, consequently, in the approach to the text. The circle is substituted by a square, and the subject Serafino Gubbio is put in evidence. Even the following transposition to foreign languages may cause several and different iconic images related to the deep structure of the plot. The most important and even amazing case of translation of pirandellian titles is probably the translation "Si Gira!" to the English "Shoot!", where the title loses its relation with the iconic image of the circle but gains other unforeseen links with other images.
Doris Schönefeld, University of Bochum
Frozen locutions - frozen dimensions: left and right in English, German and Russian
The study starts out from what has been found with regard to semantic (or rather conceptual) ordering principles in linguistic freezes: that - at least speakers of English - imitate in syntax man's natural egocentric perceptual serialization of up before down, front before back and right before left (cf. Landsberg 1995: 70).
Though there is little doubt about the linguistic reflection of man's asymmetry in the perception of front-back (ie 'front' before 'back'), assumptions about a preference for 'right' before 'left' are formulated with a much higher degree of vagueness and uncertainty.
In order to shed more light onto this situation, English, German and Russian corpora have been searched for the co-occurrences of English 'left' and 'right', German 'links' and 'rechts', and Russian 'levo' and 'pravo'.
Contrary to expectation, though in line with a more intuitive feeling of the analyst, left seemingly precedes right in a significantly higher number of phrases. Besides presenting these facts extracted from large amounts of data, the study will make suggestions as to what the motivations for this result may be.
Elzbjeta Tabakowska, Jagiellonian University
Point of view and iconicity
Abstract: The proposed paper will re-examine the category of POV, as described in mainstream literary theory, in terms of the concepts of point of view and reference point constructions, defined in Ronald W. Langacker's model of grammar. In my analysis, I will focus on morphology and syntax.
Using extracts from literary texts as illustration, I will provide evidence for the claim that speakers use particular grammatical forms and structures to organize physical, mental and time spaces, and that they do so by miming particular relationships which they perceive to hold beteeen objects within the physical three-dimensional space. Numerous parallels between (visual) perception and conception are today taken for granted, both by psychologists and by linguistis of cognitivist persuasion. However, the capability of the human mind to perceive iconic relationshuips and to construct complex mental spaces where analogous relationships are found to hold makes it possible not only to iconically represent actually perceived setups, but also to impose structure upon the observed things and events. In particular, by choosing - and then imposing upon the receiver - a given POV the author of a text directs the latter's attention to a complex matrix of spatial relations (on either the actual or a virtual plane) by appealing to his "iconic competence". The analysis of the data will show how the mechanism may be intentionally used for various purposes, from purely aesthetic considerations to ideological and/or political manipulation.
Jean-Louis Tilleuil, Université catholique de Louvain
Olga Vorobyova, Kiev National Linguistic University
Iconicity of Sudden Fiction and the Emotional Resonance Effect: Turning Suddenness into Sadness
Abstract: Heuristic relevance of iconicity, both in its 'naive' and culturally conventionalized versions (cf.Noth 1995:121-127), has been reconfirmed within the framework of cognitive poetics that suggests cognitive hypotheses for poetic effects in verse and prose (see Tsur 1992; Freeman 2000; Stockwell 2002). Iconicity becomes particularly instrumental in addressing the issue of emotional resonance generated by literary text via tacit textual challenges - suspense, ambiguity, anomalies (see Vorobyova 2001). Our assumption is that the underlying mechanism of emotional resonance effect comes down to creating a simple, semantically motivated iconic image (that of line, circle, spring, spiral, tune, beat etc.)which, being inscribed in literary texture via oscillations of rhythm, particular configurations of key words and syntactical constructions, alliteration patterns, exercises a subliminal impact on the reader. The interpreter, applying to the verbal texture a set of close reading techniques, can construe this image, using textual clues. The above assumption is verified through the analysis of short-short stories, "Sudden Fiction", that present a blend of various narrative techniques, poetic diction, and 'living voice' implications giving rise to the 'emotively diffuse'(Tsur el-ref: 1) atmosphere of 'suddenness'. Interpreting Robert Coover's "A Sudden Story" (Coover 1986:VII), as genre-emblematic for "Sudden Fiction", through cognitive poetics' lenses reveals the in-built oxymoron of PREDICTED SUDDENNESS that provokes emotive resonance. The analysis integrates construing a cluster of conceptual metaphors (LIFE IS A PATH, LIFE IS A CYCLE, LIFE IS A STORY), inferring emergent structures (the key one being 'true freedom is being ignorant of being free'), reading into the text a syntactically-supported (parentheses, punctuation, inversion etc.)sensory images of symmetry/asymmetry, pendulum/circle as well as those of broken-rhythm beat and phonosemantically accentuated (through the sd-st fluctuations) hidden 'riding-a-horse' tune, based on 'associative iconicity' (Fischer 1999: 129-131). All of which, together with quite evident intertextual Frostian motifs ("I have some promises to keep/ and miles and miles to go before I sleep..."), conveys to the reader a mildly ironic note of sadness, poising a never resolved, ultimately suspenseful erasure ending of expected suddenness.
Nicolas Wanlin, Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV
Iconicité et rhétoricité dans les ekphrasis poétiques de Théophile Gautier
Il y a deux façons d'interpréter la tripartition peircienne icone/indice/symbole : soit ce sont trois catégories de signes exclusives les unes des autres, soit ce sont trois modes de signification, généralement à l'ouvre dans tout signe, mais combinés de diverses manières. Ces deux points de vue ont chacun leur vertu heuristique mais il peut sembler profitable d'adopter aujourd'hui le second tant le premier a prédominé et a conduit à figer l'opposition de l'iconique et du symbolique. Surtout, si opposition il y a, ce qui fait la richesse et la souplesse de la sémiotique peircienne est sa dimension ternaire et non binaire. Il ne s'agit donc pas tant d'opposer les notions de motivation et d'arbitraire que d'observer la complexité des relations entre un signe, son objet et le sujet qui les associe.
C'est dans cet esprit que l'on abordera la question a priori classique de la représentation d'ouvres d'art (ekphrasis) dans deux poèmes de Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Il s'agit de confronter une ouvre verbale et une ouvre plastique, mais surtout de comprendre comment l'attitude de réception du poète se traduit dans son geste d'énonciation. On voudrait montrer que l'iconicité des ouvres décrites engage une relation au spectateur qui peut être analysée sous l'espèce de l'indice et que le fonctionnement rhétorique du poème (en particulier ses figures) sert la construction d'un système symbolique au sens pleinement peircien du mot, c'est-à-dire l'expression d' une règle, d'une loi. On montrera ainsi comment la construction rhétorique de l'ekphrasis articule les trois niveaux de l'aspect, de la relation subjective et du substrat gnomique.
Dans le recueil Émaux et camées, on examinera tout particulièrement les poèmes " Contralto " et " La Fellah " qui décrivent respectivement la sculpture d'Hermaphrodite endormi du Musée du Louvre et une aquarelle de la princesse Mathilde. Malgré des arguments différents, ces poèmes présentent des structures sémiotiques analogues et qui s'éclairent l'une l'autre. L' iconicité y est traitée comme la beauté du corps féminin, diversement dissimulé ou refusé à la contemplation. L'ordre de l'indice réside - on tentera de le montrer - dans l'érotisation problématique de ces objets d'art par le poète. Le niveau symbolique est celui où se forme une maxime, explicite ou tacite, qui permet de conférer un statut stable (et moral) à la relation sujet/signe/objet.
John White, German and Comparative Literature at King's College London.
"Coconut Shells and Creaking Doors": The Iconicity of Radio-Play Sound-Effects. De-familiarization versus Fidelity.
The paper will consist of three parts: a consideration of sound-effects in quasi-realistic radio plays, paying particular attention to the degree of iconicity in what is a relatively conventionalized sign-system. The work of theoretical work of Lance Sieveking (1934) and Tim Crook (1999) will be interpreted within a Peircean semiotic framework to consider elements of the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic within the established conventions of radio play acoustic techniques. Illustrations will be drawn mainly from English and German drama.
A second section will explore the role of sound-effects working with limited levels of iconicity in post-war dramas where a specifically Brechtian form of de-familiarization is required. This section will consider recent attempts at approaching Brechtian 'Verfremdung' within an iconic framework.
The third and main section will offer a detailed analysis of the estranging sound-effects in Peter Handke's 'Hoerspiel' (the play's title) of 1968. Since the montage of sound effects employed in this work is itself a de-familiarized version of the radio-play's acoustic effects (one stage-direction reads: 'the radio-play sound of a door being opened), I hope to use this extreme example to explore aspects of acoustic iconicity. In other words, to show that iconicity in drama does not have to be purely visual in the way that many semiotic approaches to the theatre have tended to suggest that it is.
Werner Wolf, Prof. Dr. University of Graz Austria Department of English Studies
Iconic blanks in literary texts
In linguistics as well as in literary studies we are used to investigating what is present in a text or as a text. In contrast to this we are less familiar with focussing on the reverse of such presence: absences within a text. Such textual absences or 'blanks' will be the subject of my contribution.
Like a lot of musical compositions that use pauses, verbal texts, whether oral or written, are not continuous sequences of sounds or letters but contain textual blanks: spaces in which nothing is heard or no letters appear, or, alternatively, in which verbal sounds and letters are replaced by non-verbal signs.
Some of these blanks are non-iconic. This applies, for instance, to accidental gaps in an incomplete text, to the merely practical purpose of the margins of most written or printed pages or to the inevitable interruptions in an oral discourse in which a speaker coughs or fetches breath - like the player of a wind instrument.
There are, however, also iconic blanks. In non-literary texts they occur, for instance, in such banal cases as in the blanks between words or sentences: empty spaces that serve as markers of semantic and syntactic difference. In literature as a secondary signifying system that realizes all potentials of linguistic signification for creating extra-layers of meaning, textual gaps are also frequent and moreover are often of special significance. Like the iconic meaning of the general pause which follows the bars dedicated to the sentence of the Christian Credo, "et sepultus est", in J. S. Bach's B-minor Mass and in many other masses, such blanks can signify death as the ultimate silence in the represented world, but this is just one of the possible iconic meanings of gaps in (and around) literary texts. Drawing on some parallels to music, I propose to highlight some of the manifold iconic uses of blanks in both oral and written texts and will illustrate them with examples from Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett and others.
