2011 Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

Eighth International Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, 16-18 June 2011


The eighth in a series of biennial international and interdisciplinary symposia organized by the Iconicity Research Project since 1997, this meeting  once again focused on iconicity – understood as form miming meaning and form, and meaning miming form and meaning – in language and in literature. It especially welcomed proposals for papers dedicated to the issues of intermediality and multimodality, discussing iconicity mediated by, for instance, different material, sensorial and spatiotemporal modes. Previous symposia have, on the one hand, concentrated on iconicity as a driving force in language on all grammatical levels, on language acquisition, and on language change. On the other hand, they have addressed the various mimetic uses of more concrete and creative iconic images and/or more abstract iconic diagrams and metaphors at all levels of the literary text, in both narrative and poetic forms, and on all varieties of discourse (literary texts, historical texts, political texts, advertising, language and music, word and image, etc.). These possibilities remained open for the 2011 symposium.


The meeting was hosted by the Forum for Intermedial Studies (http://lnu.se/forskargrupper/forum-for-intermedial-studies?l=en), Linnaeus University, campus Växjö (Sweden).

 
Keynotes: Masako Hiraga, Wendy Steiner, Frederik Stjernfelt and Mark Turner.

Abstracts and Program

Abstracts

 

Hypoicons in intersemiotic translation

Daniella Aguiar and Joao Queiro

Universidade Fed. do Rio de Janeiro and Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais

 

In 1903, Charles Sanders Peirce made a distinction between icons and iconic signs, or hypoicons, and briefly introduced a division of the latter into images, diagrams, and metaphors. According to this division, images represent simple qualities involved in iconic sign-mediated processes. Differently, diagrams represent, through the relations between its parts, the analogous relations that constitute the related parts of the object it represents. The object of the diagram is always a relation. Unlike the image, which stands for superficial qualities, the diagram is an arrangement of related parts, and its object is an analogous relation. Finally, the metaphor is an icon of analogical relations between interpretative effects, or the interpretants. The metaphor represents the interpretative effect of a sign by creating an analogical parallelism with another interpretant. 

Our major proposal here is to introduce this division, and provide some examples of its application in dance intersemiotic translation from literature. Examples include “Shutters Shut” (2003) of the Dutch dance company Nederlands Dans Theater II, and “5.sobre.o.mesmo” (2010), a recent Brazilian production. They are based on Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose. “Shutters Shut” recreates relevant acoustic properties of Stein’s reading “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, her prosody and rhythmic progression, in terms predominantly diagrammatic. In this case, composition and sequence of movements recreate some structural relations, number of verbal tokens and its temporal distribution. We identify, at the same translation, metaphorical aspects related to the embodiment of references figuratively transposed into a very stereotyped class of movements. In “5.sobre.o.mesmo”, we observe a typically Steinean type-token relationship translated in terms of short and repetitive body behavior, and psychological atmosphere effects recreated in terms of lighting and sound design.

 

 

Iconicity in Mimetic Grammar 

Kimi Akita 

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science / the University of Tokyo 

 

This paper illustrates the significance of iconicity in various components of the grammar of inherently iconic/sound-symbolic lexical items (aka mimetics, ideophones). I posit a continuum of lexical iconicity, which is discussed as the main axis of mimetic grammar: namely, innovative onomatopoeic expressions (e.g., vrrrrooom) > voice mimetics (e.g., meow) > noise mimetics (e.g., blast ‘slap’ (Basque)) > mimetics for visual or textural information (e.g., búzúubùzùu ‘unkempt’ (Hausa), g••nz••ngz••ng ‘dry’ (Cantonese)) > mimetics for internal experience (e.g., semttuk ‘chilly’ (Korean), sinmiri ‘pensive’ (Japanese)) > nonmimetic regular words (e.g., tree). This hierarchy has some linguistic correlates. Specifically, highly iconic mimetics tend to be: 1) crosslinguistically prevalent (e.g., animal mimicry), 2) morphologically/phonologically peculiar (e.g., monosyllabicity of roots), 3) syntactically isolated from the core of a clause (as interjections and adjuncts), 4) referentially fixed (i.e., difficult to semantically extend or change), and 5) easy to acquire (for both children and L2 learners). All these tendencies can be understood as a reflection of the fact that the lexical iconicity hierarchy is concerned with how deeply each type of mimetic is integrated into the language core and how strongly it is grammatically constrained. Based on a broad range of data, the current discussion enables us to theorize the huge pile of descriptions of mimetics in the literature in terms of a common, crosslinguistically applicable ground.

 

 

Interpretation of Photopoetry: Mirroring a Subjective Approach or a Two-Eyed Reader?

Anette Almgren White

Linnaeus University

 

This paper highlights and problematizes reading strategies when analysing visual iconic interrelations between poems and pictures in photographic picture books, photopoetry (Almgren White, 2009).  All meaning making can be regarded as an act of interpretation where different iconic levels are set into play referred to as imaginisation, diagrammatisation, and allegorisation(Johansen, 2003). Juxtapositions of text and picture ought to make the reader more observant of differences/similarities between the symbolic signs in the visual text and the iconic signs in the still image and vice versa. If one accepts this assumption one may ask if iconicity perceived in the iconotext (Hallberg, 1984) is subjective, i.e. a rhetorical figure created by the sender, or an analytical approach, i.e. formed by the receiver? The sender / receiver situation is taken into account from the stance of Wolfgang G. Müller (2001) where he stresses the difference between rhetorical iconicity that is subjective and an iconicity reflecting a (historic) reality that is objective. The iconicity presented here is based on Peirce’s triad, icon, index and symbol and on Fischer’s and Nänny’s typology (1999) where iconicity is defined as imagic or diagrammatic, and where the diagrammatic is split into the structural and the semantic.  

The presentation aims at opening up a discussion of how visual iconic interrelations can be interpreted both as rhetorical figures as well as they can be perceived as the result of a chosen analytical perspective by the viewer where the iconic function may be more subtle depending on the frame of reference (such as contextualization). The examples will be taken from the Swedish poets Katarina Frostenson and Rut Hillarp (1914–2003). Swedish Academy member Frostenson cooperates with photographer/artist Jean Claude Arnault in three books and their interplay on similarities/differences in the spatial organization of the visual text and the still image might be read as iconotextual irony, parody and paradoxy, usually referred to as expressions of postmodernism. Hillarp, modernist poet, combined in her later career poems and surrealisticly inspired photomontages in three works: characteristic for her artistry are the visual iconic parallels in forms and meaning between the visual text and the picturemontage. The parallelism is found for example in the spatial organization of typography, vectors and lineation in the visual text and in elements of composition in the picturemontages bearing impact on the iconotextual meaning.

 

 

 

A Sounding Visual Text in Motion: The Title Sequence and Intermedial Iconicity

Jens Arvidsson

Lund University

 

Within the title sequence “the film can be said to dream of its alternate form,” according to Georg Stanitzek (2009). This ‘alternate form’ is a doubling, an offering of elements or a prediction of the narrative to come. If the title sequence provides “a focus that allows for a transition into the movie” – imitating the film or aspects of it – what exactly makes it possible to address the title sequence in terms of intermedial iconicity? What elements double or imitate the film and how?

A title sequence is the way cinematic films and television programs present their title with the main production and cast members. One fundamental and distinctive trait of this presentation is what I would describe as a visual text in motion to which a musical theme or sound is matched or combined. This makes it possible for the sequence to produce its iconic function. Whether this can be called intermedial iconicity is also a question to be answered: if the qualification of intermedial iconicity is when a work imitates formal features that is characteristic of another medium, then one must recognize the title sequence as something other than the film; current theories clearly states its duality of taking part and being detached from the film. Primarily a paratext (peritext) to the film the sequence is presented in the same material mode from what it imitates, but exclusively uses visual text to do more than semantics (the symbolic function of the text). This way of looking at it allows the sequence to appear either as an entity separate from or integrated into the film.

The main focus in this presentation will be on how this visual text acts spatiotemporally in combination with music or sound to create an iconic intermedial function; the audiovisual relation within the sequence will be considered as a way of emphasizing the appearance and acting of the visual texts, including the moving images in the sequence. The paper will be an initializing examination of the title sequence and its seemingly promise of iconicity and intermedial relation towards the movie it belongs.

As diverse as title sequences can be, my take on it should not be seen as a general model for the whole genre, but an attempt to locate and exemplify intermedial iconicity within the genre. Examples that will be included: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963); Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Panic Room (2002); Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum (2006).

 

 

Iconicity and Music Videos 

Mikael Askander

Lund University 

 

In my presentation I will focus on music videos. The concept of iconicity is both a crucial and a useful concept when it comes to the understanding of what a music video is and how it functions aesthetically and intermedially. I will discuss iconicity in general in music videos, as an expression of intermediality, not only in the interrelations between word and image, but also in the connections between music and images, and between music, lyrics, images, and sounds. 

In this context intermedial intertextuality is relevant to put into play. Can one speak of iconicity when a music video is used and referred to in – or makes use of – other music videos, commercials, art, literature etc.? I deal with music videos in general, but I will draw upon specific examples of music videos from especially Bob Dylan and M.I.A (and also from Madonna). Theoretically I will take my starting points in Lars Elleström’s writings on iconicity and media modalities, Werner Wolf’s ideas on intermediality, transmediality, and iconicity, and Carol Vernallis’ study of music videos. 

 

 

To draw a bow   引.: A dimension of iconicity in metaphor variation at the level of linguistic instantiation

Mahe Avila Hernandez

University of Havanna

 

This paper proposes a dimension of iconicity in metaphor variation at the level of linguistic instantiation, which would be novel in respect of Kövecses’s (2005) “kinds of variation in the linguistic expression of the same conceptual metaphor”.  Such a criterion of iconicity is taken from Hiraga´s (2005) understanding of the mappings of the “motor-sensory images evoked by linguistic expressions” as iconic moments in metaphor.

A brief review of cases of metaphor variation between English and Chinese studied by Ning Yu enlightens us about the convenience of looking at this dimension. I dwell on the theoretical coherence of my proposal within Grady’s theory framework. Some cases of metaphor variation between Spanish and Chinese are briefly analyzed, according to the relevance of the imagic mapping.

 

 

The Iconicity of Suicide as Antidote: Elegiac Poems by Tom Gouws

Marthinus Beukes

Unversity of Johannesburg

 

In Marlene van Niekerk and Adriaan van Zyl’s Memorandum - a story with paintaings (2006: 26), the narrator J.F. Wiid remarks: “I have the feeling that I find myself in a tangle ...  It is a jungle of sentences and paragraphs in which I have strung myself upside down. What is first, must be last, and what is outside, inside, and every detail must be bricked in in the right spot ..." This comment can be seen as the synthesis of suicidal poets and artists’ crumbling experience of reality, which forms the theme of this paper. Wiid’s reference to the building in of details into strategic/particular places is reminiscent of Gouws’s method in his elegiac poems (nagliedere) from his latest collection Ligloop (2010). The poetic form becomes an image of the content, and vice versa. The stories of Sergei Esenin, Díaz Mirón and Johannes Kerkorrel’s suicides are represented via syntactic, rhythmic and phonological iconicity in such a way that it elucidates these poets’ crumbling selves. On the one hand, the patterned and restrained form of Esenin and Mirón’s suicide narratives constitutes an attempt to ‘heal’ a broken image. The broken form of the elegiac poem (naglied) dedicated to Kerkorrel stands in contrast to this approach. The fact that the poet grouped these poems together and titled them similarly can be seen as a form of emphasis. 

My goal with this paper is to interpret these poetic narratives through a reflection on poetic form and the iconicity it establishes. I will also refer to the poems ‘death & company’ (from the collection troglodiet / troglodyte) and ‘die dood van charles butler’ (from diaspora) to interpret how the iconizing of suicide functions as a theme in his work. 

 

 

Is There A Theory of Aesthetics in Saussure?

Jui-Pi Chien

National Taiwan University

 

This study argues for the fruitfulness of the perspectives of ‘logic’ and ‘rhetoric’ by extending Ferdinand de Saussure’s critical tools to our inter- and multimedial studies of arts. It also seeks to articulate some notions concerning ‘aesthetics’ in Saussure, which help bridging the gap between the Saussurean and Peircean approaches, for the greater benefit of the study of art history. Throughout the history of elaborating on the congeniality between Saussure and Peirce, linguists like Emile Benveniste, Louis Hjelmslev and Roman Jakobson have advocated taking ‘logic’ and ‘temporality’ as the keys to our perception and interpretation of inter-systemic or inter-textual similarities and differences of the arts. Meanwhile, literary theorists like Tzvetan Todorov, Peter Szondi and Paul de Man have utilized the trope of ‘negation’ so as to align Saussure’s thoughts with those of the forerunners of analytical aesthetics – Kant and Hegel – and to revise our understanding of these philosophical attempts in terms of the concept of sign. The two lines of developing semiotics as a metalanguage have on the one hand dissolved the superficial distinctions assumed to exist between ‘symbol’ and ‘sign,’ and on the other renewed the trope of ‘allegory’ as traditionally conceived in the discipline of art history. The broadened concept of allegory construes a work of art as a ‘battling state,’ in which the artist has deliberately revised, distorted and even misinterpreted certain achievements of his/her forerunners. By means of these enlightening revisions of semiotic theories, this study sheds light on the hidden value of Saussure’s newly-discovered manuscript in which he discusses ‘the double essence’ of language. The renovated notion of allegory was to have been sketched briefly towards the end of this text as Saussure takes ‘radical disparity’ as the key to understanding the relationship between ‘two successive stages’ of language (états de langue) in time.  

 

 

The Creation of Interpretants from an Iconic Sign: An Advertising Case 

Antonio Roberto Chiachiri and Edson P. Pfützenreuter

Faculdade Cásper Líbero and UNICAMP 

 

In general terms this article discusses the creation of interpretants from iconic signs; our main object is the visual communication of Nescafé Decaff© instant coffee publicity campaign, that targets a large audience composed of people that, despite being from many different cultures, share some collateral experiences (Peirce's concept), becoming an universal campaign. We also choose that subject because of its non-detailed visual appearance. Manfredo Massironi (Vedere con il disegno: Aspetti tecnici, cognitivi, comunicativi), have said that each image consists in a reduction of data that belong to the visual world. In the pieces analyzed such reduction is substantial, since they do not present any texture or color gradients. They show only straight colors and geometrical forms, elements that are typical for logotypes, pictograms and other products of graphic design. This research has its theoretical basis in Peirce's semiotics, in special on his classification of signs. All signs have several possible interpretations. The interpretant created by visual signs could be the association between the image and another thing, driven by the image itself. In visual communication, interpretations are driven by the arrange of formal elements of visual language, which makes image identification and memorization easier. Sometimes possibilities are too much open becoming the visual sign difficult to be understood, as in the Roger Price's drawing that he called droodles. By this word, the humorist is referring to enigmatic images that give us only a few shapes and lines that merely suggest something. The images we analyze present a possibility of interpretation as open as droodles, however, the relation among the image, the verbal signs, and the colateral experience allows the viewer to direct his/her interpretation in terms of what is intended by such advertisings. As Peirce's theory is very general, to understand the semiosis complexity it is necessary also to use theoretical instruments taken from language theories, perception and visual communication. 

 

 

Grammar-Internal Mimicking

Jac Conradie, 

University of Johannesburg

 

Several instances are found in Afrikaans grammar where lexical elements and grammatical structures are mimicked in a single sentence or construction in order to create a new configuration, often with a more emphatic or expressive function. Such instances of language change are found in the syntax, morphology and lexicon of the language and differ from conventional analogy in that the change is not merely a replacement, but emphasis,  expressivity, etc. is added.They also differ from Lass’s exaptation in that “old” language material is not assigned new functions, but maintains its original function while at the same time serving as a model for innovation. This is illustrated in the following examples.

In a certain type of reduplication, also in evidence in a language such as English which does not usually make use of reduplication, e.g. ‘n óú-ou skip, ‘an old, old ship’, the first adjective copies the second to emphasise the age of the ship. This kind of reduplication differs from other forms of reduplication in that the first element may receive contrastive stress.

The negative particle nie is duplicated sentence-finally to indicate the end of the rhema section in its scope. In origin, this may also have had an emphatic function. Note that, unlike in Dutch, the first negative has increased its scope by occurring  before the sentential object, e.g. Hy het nie sy rekenaar afgeskakel nie.  ‘He did not switch off his computer.’

In a commonly occurring strongly emphatic construction, e.g. 

 

Rook sal sy nooit weer rook nie.

smoke will she never again smoke not

‘She will never ever smoke again.’

 

the main verb rook  ‘smoke’ is copied in sentence-initial topicalisation, whence the emphasis achieved. The origin may be a “contamination” of Rook sal sy nooit weer nie  ‘Smoking she will never do again’ and Sy sal nooit weer rook nie  ‘She will never smoke again’.

Main clause structure is often copied in subordinate clauses to replace the conjunction plus verb final construction, perhaps carrying over some of the illocutionary force (as statement or question) to the subordinate clause, e.g.

 

            Hy sê hy sal dit gou-gou doen  (instead of:     … dat hy dit gou-gou sal doen)

he says he will it quickly do                                          … that he it quickly will do

            ‘He says he will do it quickly’                                   ‘… that he will do it quickly’

 

Sy wonder hoe kry jy dit reg.                                         … hoe jy dit regkry.

she wonders how get you it right                                  … how you it right get

‘She is wondering how you are managing’        ‘… how you are managing.

 

Note that Hy sal dit gou-gou doen and Hoe kry jy dit reg? would be the underlying statement and question, respectively.

The imperative, beginning with the main verb in Afrikaans, may be lexicalised in verbs such as geepad  ‘give way’ and pasop  ‘look out’ from Gee pad! and Pas op!  where padgee and oppaswould follow normally from inversion rules, e.g. Hulle het vinnig gegeepad (varying with padgegee) ‘They departed/fled quickly’. Concatenated main verbs in V1 or V2 position, a typical characteristic of Afrikaans, may also have the imperative as its model, e.g. Probeer werk julle regtig?  lit. try work you really, ‘Are you really trying to work?’, alternating with Probeer julle regtig werk? The imperative would be Probeer werk!

In as far as lexical items and constructions may be looked upon as signifiers, iconicity is implied by the fact that signifiers are seen in several instances to copy or mimic other signifiers, creating new lexical formations  or constructions in the process and importing their pragmatic characteristics in many cases.  In some cases grammatical simplification is achieved, but in instances such as the duplicated negative particle and, in particular, the type Rook sal sy nooit weer rook nie  ‘She will never ever smoke again’ expressivity seems to prevail over simplification.

 

 

Visual Iconicity in Latin poetry

Paulo Dainotti

University of Salerno

 

This paper aims to assess the role of visual iconicity in Latin poetry. Major Latin poems include a good deal of verses that succeed in recreating mimetically the subject matter by exploiting the potential of word ordering. A good case in point is “speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem” (Aen. IV 165), where Virgil’s carefully chosen word order enables the reader to visualize Dido and Aeneas inside the cave.

To date, visual iconicity has not attracted very much attention from classical scholars; yet a number of labels have been produced to capture its function – namely, ‘pictorial arrangement of word’, ‘metaphor from word order’, ‘mimetic syntax’, and ’iconic hyperbaton’. Far from being a comprehensive treatment of the subject, Young (1933) and Lateiner (1990) restrict their exploration to Virgil and Ovid’s Metamorphoses respectively; valuable suggestions can also be found in the commentaries on Virgil by Traina (2004²), Coleman (1977), and Harrison (1991).

This paper aims to single out the major patterns of visual iconicity in Latin poetry in order to make a case for its relevance to literary history and through textual evidence to reinforce the non arbitrariness of the iconic interpretation.

The analysis of thousands of hexameters reveals, in fact, a surprisingly high frequency of framing hyperbaton (a rare pattern of word order, with the adjective opening the verse and the noun closing it) when associated with a keyword meaning a lengthy object. A telling example is provided in Virgil’s Eclogues VIII 71 (“frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis”), where the word order clearly  creates the image of a snake.

 

 

Mediating Between the Verbal and the Non-Verbal Semiotic Element: Multimodal Semiotics Translation in Practice

George Damaskinidis
 Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology
 The Open University (UK)
 
 

It is important for translators to develop visual literacy skills enabling them to read multimodal texts, to interpret the content of non-verbal semiotic elements, and to examine their social impact (Gambier and Gottlieb, 2001; Gottlieb, 2005). Translation between these non-verbal modes and verbal ones (‘intersemiotic translation’ according to Jakobson, 1966) has gained new impetus in the context of what Bamford (2003) and others argue is a turn to the visual in the 21^st century.

Although intersemiotic translation is not a new concept, it seems that, according to Desjardins (2008) and Tercedor-Sánchez et al (2009), there has been little work done in Translation Studies with a clear focus on the way the image and its accompanying verbal element interact specifically in translation. While this interaction would seem to suggest that both modes are dependent on each other for meaning, in my doctoral thesis (Damaskinidis, on-going), I approach the image as an autonomous type of “text”, within a larger (multimodal) text, based on Barthes’ (1964) and Forceville’s (1999) argument that the image has a ‘structural autonomy’.

Today, then, translators are called upon to translate multimodal texts which may contain several non-verbal modes. One such text, the print advertisement, may influence translation because of its semiotic elements (e.g. image, colour, layout) and the perception channel (i.e. sight and touching) used to understand the message of the multimodal text (Gerzymisch-Arbogast, 2005; Unsworth, 2006).        

Within this environment, and guided by the call for Higher Education to adopt a strong commitment to visual literacy (Bleed, 2005), I set up a study in multimodal translation involving undergraduate students from the foreign language and literature departments of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). A main theme of my research is what is involved in reading images while translating multimodal texts.  

After a brief introduction to my study, I will present a part of its experimental phase, and use an advertisement to engage the audience by:

 

Ø    First, showing them four photos and a short verbal element and ask them to find which photo they think accompanies the verbal element. This method echoes the ‘photo-elicitation technique’ (Rose, 2007) and it is expected to stimulate the audience to start relating visual elements to verbal ones; 

Ø    Then, asking them questions, based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) metafunctions (representational, interactive and compositional), on the complete advertisement, to help them examine whether the non-verbal modes affect the translation of verbal modes. The pre-selected words/phrases to be translated (in their native language) will be hyper-linked to relevant videos to “speed-up” what Kussmaul (1995) and Rose (2007) call ‘visualization’ as a booster for creative translations;

Ø    Finally, asking them to consider an alternative photo, should a commissioner of a translation of the advertisement wanted a human figure in the photo that would have been more familiar to their (the audience’s) own culture. This technique will summarise the discussion and highlight cross-cultural translation differences. 

 

These three stages will enable me to act as a helper, challenger and facilitator, by means of a set of questions and responses – what McIntosh (2010) call ‘reflective conversation’ – both with myself and with the audience. These activities are expected to motivate the audience to ask questions about multimodal translation in the ten-minute discussion part of my presentation. 

 

 

“Mode-Bleeding”: When Intermediality Includes an Interpersonal Dimension

Alexanne Don 

University of Sydney

 

Under Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) the Register of any text is described by reference to three interrelated meaning-making resources: Field, Tenor and Mode. Mode is taken to both constrain and be construed by the meanings in any text by reference to resources of channel - either graphic or phonic - and medium - either spoken or written (Hasan, 1985). More recently, researchers of more visually-oriented texts refer to ‘multi-modality’ to signal that the texts they are interested in describing make meaning through a combination of both written or spoken verbal text together with more ideographic means of communucation, such as diagrams, photographs and mixed media. Other students of multi-modality ignore written or verbal forms of texts and focus on the visual, graphic elements entirely.

The texts in the study reported here were all written, that is created in the written ‘medium’, and all ‘graphic’, i.e. there were no phonic elements in the text creation. However, it was apparent that due to the context of production, some graphic elements of the texts were not entirely ‘written’. That is to say, the contrast between ‘written’ modes and spoken ‘modes’ of meaning-making lies in the nature of the production or creation of the texts, and the expected Mode-based differences were not upheld. Whereas the written medium allows reflectivity and editability before dissemination, texts created in the spoken medium are produced “online”, spontaneously, in real-time, and hence display certain features related to this context of creation – features such as pauses, hesitations, retractions, floor-holding strategies (er, ummm), mispronunciations, signals of (what Brown & Levinson 1987 inter alia have called) ‘dispreferred seconds’, and so on. This appears related to the fact that Mode in the context of electronic discussions lists is problematised under SFL, so that the locus of reception and response is split between a ‘real-time’ material context comprised of a person and a computer, and a virtual context of interaction ‘out there’, on the screen, in the mind, and in the archives of the list.

Because the texts in the study were created with the expectation of being read by an engaged audience who were also potential respondees, writers signalled their awareness of the audience though the use of a number of graphic symbols that were neither entirely ‘spoken’ nor ‘written’, but functioned to both signal the development of the argument being made and signal an awareness of the interpersonal context in which they were composed. The texts were all composed in writing, and yet they display features that are more common in speech. In another sense, posts may be considered as ‘performance’ or verbal art (e.g. Bauman & Briggs 1990), with the writer signalling an awareness of ‘audience’, performing their contributions in expectation of feedback. The study examines and categorises these elements according to the functions they serve in co-text, functions that are neither written nor spoken but somewhere in between.

 

 

Iconicity/Indexicality in Advertising: The Power of Suggestion on the Scene

Maria Ogécia Drigo 

University of Sorocaba (UNISO)

 

Advertising is the context of this paper that aims to address the relation between iconicity and indexicality in the advertisings and also to assess how this relation triggers analogies, mental operation that prevails in this action, as signs, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. To this end, we present some aspects of the  advertising language  from the perspective of Baudrillard and Virilio, and in order to highlight the prominence of visual representation or image to words, hence the fact that these visual representations of establishing the domain of index and the icon show the levels of iconicity, taken from  its previous state -  perception (pure icon), to the  form it acquires in perception (current icon) until you reach the representation, even if degenerate, weak, governed by the relationship of similarity (iconic sign or hypoicon). The different degrees of iconicity permeated by indexicality, which are present in ads campaingns will act on advertising - bringing to light the visual representation - as a sign that, although having outstanding connection with the object, emphasing on qualitative aspects, which may make it prevail as hypoicon. Thus, the comparison is the vector of action of this sign, that is, the analogy is the mental operation that installs in its genesis thus constituting the reign of suggestion.

 

Keywords: advertising, visual representation, iconicity, indexicality, analogy.

 

 

The Degrees of Indetermination in Intersemiotic Translation.

Nicola Dusi 

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

 

Reception theory-based narratological studies that have compared literature and cinema have for the most part dealt with the problem of the “specificity” of each medium in phenomenological (and referentialist) terms. They suggest that the fundamental difference in semiotic systems lies in the different ways in which they represent the so-called real world, by distinct degrees and areas of indetermination (Chatman 1978; Genette 1982; Gaudreault 1988). This idea can be traced back to the thinking of Husserl, which was, then, developed by Ingarden (1931). Discussing the problem of "intersemiotic translation" (Dusi, 2000) from literature to film Eco (2003) maintains that it  cannot be anything other than adaptation because it transforms the previous text often radically. This inevitably explicates the unsaid, showing something in image form and therefore establishing a point of view precisely where the novel is vaguest.

In my opinion cinema, like literature, can create variable degrees of indetermination. Its peculiar status as a “syncretic semiotic system” (Metz, 1971),  gives the cinematic text plenty of scope for "narrative", "figurative" and "discursive" implications (Greimas 1984). The audiovisual image may be deliberately open to interpretations and free to not-show and not-say. For example, it may employ contrasts in sound, unfocused or point-of-view images, partial shots of actors limited to specific details, all of which can create potential elements of indetermination that enable the target text to translate the ambiguities and the semantic open-endedness of the source text (Fontanille, 1995; Dusi, 2010). To illustrate these issues of indetermination I will use Smoke by Wayne Wang (USA 1995).

 

Keywords: adaptation, intersemiotic translation, vagueness.

 

 

Spatiotemporal Aspects of Iconicity

Lars Elleström

Linnaeus University

 

In my article, “Iconicity as Meaning Miming Meaning, and Meaning Miming Form” (in Signergy, Iconicity in Language and Literature 9, 2010), it is argued that there is no form without meaning, that all meaning has some sort of form, and that meaning hence may mime both form and meaning. Two fundamental distinctions are used. The first is Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known division into three types of iconicity: image, diagram, and metaphor, which is extended to include “weak” and “strong diagrams”. The second is a distinction between ontologically different appearances of signs: visual material signs, auditory material signs, and complex cognitive signs. A two-dimensional model illustrating the relations between these two distinctions is presented, showing that the field of iconicity includes many phenomena that are not generally seen as related, but that nevertheless can be systematically compared. 

            This model can be used to compare different sorts of media that have vital iconic traits. I thus take it to be a model that demonstrates the complexity of intermedial relations. However, it lacks one important media aspect: the spatiotemporal modality. The character of iconicity is affected not only by material and sensorial aspects of the representamen, but also by its spatiotemporal traits. Some media are both spatial and temporal, for instance, while others are non-temporal, and there are many other aspects of space and time to be considered if one wants to grasp the multifaceted characteristics of iconicity in different media. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to discuss how the spatiotemporal modality of media can be elaborated within the framework of my model from 2010.

 

 

 

On Some Simple Iconic Strategies in Concept Albums within the Italian Singer-Songwriter Tradition

Sebastiano Ferrari

Louvain Catholic University

            

This paper will focus on the recurring iconic patterns originating from the combination of lyrics and music within the Italian singer-songwriter tradition. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of the concept album which became a consolidated expression of effectively and systematically arranging music patterns and poetic nuances in accordance with a structured topic. 

The works under examination include Storia di un impiegato (“Story of a bureaucrat”) by Fabrizio De André and Il giorno aveva cinque teste (“The day had five heads”) resulting from the collaboration between the poet Roberto Roversi and musician and singer Lucio Dalla, who, at the end of the Seventies, began to compose both the lyrics and the music of his songs. 

            Both of these albums include distinctive iconic devices which can be found either in the lyrics or in music, although main focus will be accorded to the combination of both, proceeding thus from the meaning of the text towards the form of the music or the purposely created sound effects. The type of iconicity present in these songs may range from a more direct representation of the object (“iconic image”) to a more abstract reference to it (“iconic diagram”) and, depending on the circumstances, the music sign gradually reflects its prevailing indexical and symbolic nature, also.

            The iconic, indexical or symbolic dimension of a specific music sign is normally explainable in function of the mutual and intrinsic exchange between music, performance style and words in a song and throughout its reference album. As a result of this, certain themes and motives of the narrative are foregrounded, and an enhancement of the visual/spatial dimension interrelated to the particular message that the author intends to convey is also facilitated.

            Music seems to contextually corroborate the meaning of the words (parameters such as rapid/slow tempos, type of sound of the lead instrument employed, articulation of the musical phrase are taken into account). In accordance with its illustrative power, music allows for a greater involvement of the listener in the narrative whilst highlighting certain key elements of the latter.

            All of these musical strategies are easily recognizable to any listener who is familiar with popular music, without the prerequisite of a particular knowledge of musicology.

 

 

Iconic Coding Principles in A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories

Heidrun Führer

Lund University

 

I focus on the verbal and iconic signs on the paratext as index for constructing meaning on the basis of material and mental frames and on iconicity. Within the stories ekphrasis and mise en abyme are repeatedly used features, that , at least, partly are based on verbal iconicity. 

Starting from Croft’s well-know observation that “the principle that the structure of language should, as closely as possible, reflect the structure of experience, that is, the structure of what is being expressed by language” (Croft 1995: 129), I will also delineate the sequence of word order used to structure the narrative as  spatiotemporal form of iconicity. Moreover, diagrammatic iconicity will be considered when analyzing the sequence of narratives in terms of structural similarity to the genre of a triptych, the formula of an altarpiece known for its organizing and affective power. By  emphasizing the frame of vision as a unifying structure I state that Byatt’s narratives can be understood as an allegory or relational icon.  

 

 

Iconic Graphic Flow: Diagrams for Imaginative Cognition

Izabel Goudart

Rio de Janeiro Federal University

 

The moving and fluid trait of the interactive graphic interfaces reveals a fundamental characteristic of the hypermedia language: the potential of openness and discovery. If, on the one hand, more options are open to the reader to make a path reflecting his own cognitive network, the multidimensional structure of connections prompts a constant shift of attention. Against the idea of a possible dispersiveness created by the new modes of reading, we intend in this paper to highlight the role of the mediation of the graphic interfaces, predominantly iconic, in the development of an experience by similarity, which implies an imaginative cognition (Kastrup, 1999). From the inventiveness standpoint, the operation of attention with its ‘wondering’ nature may enable problematizing experiences seen as rifts in the ordinary cognitive flow. Similarly, to understand semiosis as learning (Peircean semiotic), the very ‘wondering’ experience of the iconic sign is responsible for the breaking of habits, established truths (CP1.635; 2.148) and the formation of new beliefs (CP 1.107). Furthermore, we discuss that the current graphic interfaces used in the education of young people prioritize symbolic signs, which trigger cognitive maps which have aged and been made hermetic by institutionalized habits, incapable of opening themselves up to the inventiveness and cognitive freshness of contemporary young minds.

 

 

By Hook or By Crook: How Various Multimodal Iconic Expressions can be Motivated by One Simple Image

William J. Herlofsky

Nagoya Gakuin University

 

Just as it is possible to say, as stated in the Linnaeus University homepage for Intermedial Studies, that there are no ‘pure’ media forms, it is also possible to say that there are no ‘pure’ languages, in that languages also employ various media and modalities to get their messages across.  It is through an interdisciplinary research project, like that supported by the ILL Symposia, that such intermedial and multimodal forms of language can be explored, and multimodal iconic expressions will also be the focus of this paper. In a paper from a previous ILL Symposium I provided a brief description of cognitive processes in which a single linguistic form, the English preposition over (and its Japan Sign Language counterparts), was shown to be associated with numerous distinct but related meanings that constituted a motivated semantic network. What the present paper will attempt to do is work through a similar cognitive process in the opposite direction, illustrating how one simple mental image can motivate various multimodal iconic expressions with various meanings.  The present analysis will accomplish this objective by focusing on how a single iconic mental representation of a hook can result in very different iconic expressions in external language.  For example, a mental representation of a hook would most likely include some kind of skeletal diagrammatic depiction of the shape of a hook, but if someone wanted to express the shape of a hook iconically in the English language, there would be problems, because there is no simple conventionalized way to express the shape of a hook iconically in spoken English.  In the more multimodal-friendly forms of written poetry and manual gestures, however, the iconic expression of the shape of a hook might be possible.  The present paper will consider just how such an iconic mental depiction of a hook might be iconically expressed in external language, first using written examples from the poem Hook by James Wright, and then numerous examples from the manual language of the Deaf in Japan, Japan Sign Language.  It will be shown how one simple mental image of a hook can be manifested in external language(s) in many different and multimodal ways, with many different meanings, meanings that, influenced also by metaphor and metonymy, may make the iconicity somewhat less transparent, but also somehow much more interesting.

 

 

 

Essence and Entropy: Iconicity in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and 

E. E. Cummings 

Martin Heusser

University of Zurich

 

The visuality of Modernist poetry is characterized by a strange heterogeneity. On the one hand there is a rich diversity of imagic and diagrammatic iconicity that complements and enhances the linguistic level, while on the other hand many texts appear visually flamboyant but refuse to yield decipherable visual information. Why would that be so? Despite claims to the contrary, the Modernists yearn a visionary world of language – like the Romantics before them. What they are trying to evoke through their texts is a sort of non- or proto-linguistic experience. The words on a page are supposed to act upon the mind of the readers not by way of linguistic signification but by visual immersion. It is such a process that Bob Brown has in mind when he exults “I bathe in Apollinaire.” To allow such – quite sensual – abandon, the linguistic aspect of poetic discourse, that is its sense and signification, is systematically put under erasure by means of visual opacity or even entropy. 

The issue of meaning – or rather its precarious nature – is reflected upon explicitly by the majority of Modernist poets: William Carlos Williams refers to it in “The Great American Novel”: “Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them—Awu tsst grang splith gra pragh og bm—Yes, one can break them.” Bob Brown, characteristically, takes things one step further when he announces “I don’t mean maybe breakemup words I mean smashum.” And E. E. Cummings shows the same fundamental diffidence in language when he contends that poetry is “that which neither means nor unmeans but IS.” The result of this highly ambiguous attitude towards meaning is, I would like to argue, a visual poetics that oscillates unstillably between essence and entropy. 

 

 

The Basho Code: Iconicity in haiku

Masako K. Hiraga

Rikkyo University, Tokyo

 

This study presents, as an illustrative and foregrounded manifestation of the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in poetry, a detailed analysis of haiku, Japanese traditional poetry of 17-mora text form. The analysis focuses on the following haiku texts composed by the great master, Basho Matsuo (1644-1694), on the level of their creation and interpretation: 

 

Text 1

閑さや	sizuka+sa   ya	still+ness   ah!
岩にしみ入	iwa  ni   simi+iru	rock  into   seep+enter
蝉の聲	semi   no     koe	cicada  ’s     voice

 

Text 2

ふる池や	huru+ike    ya	old+pond   ah!
蛙飛込	kawazu  tobi+komu	frog   jump+be-included
水のおと	mizu   no    oto	water  ’s   sound

 

With their formal brevity and semantic richness, haiku are considered to offer an optimal example of how the human mind connects things with minimal linguistic resources but in a particularly subtle way. Through our analysis, it is shown that Basho utilized iconicity and metaphor as connecting principles in his works, ranging from sounds to texts, from texts to inter-texts. 

We begin by looking at iconicity on the level of poetic composition, particularly in the revising process of Text 1, to argue that Basho did consciously and unconsciously employ iconicity when he revised the text three times. His choice of words, syntax, and orthography affected on the sound structure and the semantic implications of the poem to the extent that the final version iconically enacts an experience of becoming still. 

Text 1 and Text 2 are the most famous and most beloved haiku in Japanese literature; and interestingly, they represent a very similar theme, “silence and sound,” or to put it metaphorically, “silence is sound.” Out of 1,000 poems Basho composed in his lifetime, these two are the only two depicting the theme of silence in the way they did. This leads to an issue of intertextuality and iconicity on the level of interpretation. When the two texts display a certain level of similarity, could we interpret that they are interconnected? If one could argue that similarity between the two texts holds not only on the semantic or thematic level of metaphor but also on the phonological, syntactic, orthographical, and other levels of iconicity, could we say that the later text is an inter-icon of the earlier; namely, the cicada poem and the frog poem could be the same icon of “profound silence”? I hope to uncover their hidden connections by using iconicity as the Basho code.

 

 

Multimodality of Onomatopoeia: A Consideration on the Semantic Extension of Adverbial Onomatopoeia in Japanese

Kazuko Inoue

Kansai University of International Studies, Japan

 

Japanese is known for having one of the largest concentrations of onomatopoeia and mimetics amongst natural languages. According to Crystal (1987), Japanese has more than three times the number of onomatopoeia and mimetics in English. The Dictionary of Iconic Expressions in Japanese (Kakehi, et al. 1996) contains about 3,500 lexical entries of iconic expressions including onomatopoeia and mimetics in Japanese. Traditionally, there are three kinds of onomatopoeia in Japanese: giongo, sound-mimicking words, giseigo, voice-mimicking words, and gitaigo, mode-mimicking words or mimetics (Hamano 1998). In the last few decades, many studies have been conducted on giongo, giseigo, and gitaigo in Japanese from various perspectives in linguistics, with polysemy receiving frequent mention as one of the significant properties of Japanese onomatopoeia  (Kakehi 1993; Kadooka 2007).

The purpose of this paper is to consider the process of how polysemous Japanese onomatopoeia semantically extends from giongo/giseigo to gitaigo and vice versa. Conventional Japanese onomatopoeia usually has a consonant-vowel (CVCV) pattern as in bata ‘a flapping sound’ and the CVCV pattern should be either reduplicated as in bata-bata or accompanied by one of the following phonological forms: a glottal stop /Q/, a syllabic nasal /N/, a prolonged vowel /R/ or an ending /-ri/ as in bataQ, bataN, bataR, batari (Waida 1984; Hamano 1998; Yamaguchi 2002). In general, most Japanese onomatopoeia is the reduplicated pattern (CVCV-CVCV) and tends to be used as adverbs. Therefore, in this paper, I analyze examples of reduplicative adverbial onomatopoeia in Japanese literature in BCCWJ (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese) as in (1) 

 

(1) a. Yuki no sara-sara to furikoboreru oto nomi ga, chinmoku o issoo   fukaku shita. <sound>

‘Only the sound of falling snow “sara-sara” made the silence    much deeper.’ (Takehiko Fukunaga, Kusa no Hana/Fuyu)

b. Sara-sara to furu yuki o nagameteiru no mo waruku nai ga, […] <vision>

‘It is not so bad to see snow falling lightly […]’ (Hiroyuki Tamaki,  Kaze ni Fukarete)

c. Mezurashiku karui yuki da. Sosite jootoo no yaki-shio no yooni sukoshi mo mizuke ga     naku sara-sara shite iru. <touch>

 ‘Unusually light and powdery snow is falling. And the snow is dry and smooth just like good salt’ (Naoya Shiga, Yuki no Hi)

 

Sara-sara refers to a specific sound of falling snow, rustling tree leaves, a purling brook and so on in giongo usage as in (1a) but, at the same time, it can also refer to other modalities of the referent which may make such a sound in gitaigo usage, such as vision or touch as in (1b) and (1c). These examples should be construed that the onomatopoeia sara-sara extends from giongo to gitaigo since sara-sara is an onomatopoeia which can refer to sound, vision and touch simultaneously or multimodally. In conclusion, I maintain that the multimodal property of onomatopoeia motivates onomatopoeia which has both iongo/giseigo and gitaigo usage—or polysemous onomatopoeia—to extend to other meanings etonymically from the cognitive linguistic perspective.

 

 

Characters Constructing Reality: Experiential Iconicity and Iconicity of Absence in Ali Smith’s Hotel World

Ritva Itkonen

University of Amsterdam

 

My essay focuses on the way the use of experiential iconicity and iconicity of absence influences the construction of a story, with a particular interest in the role of focalizing characters. Representing reality through the point of view of a specific character has an effect on how a reader conceives the fictional world. The narrative voice of someone experiencing the narrative and thus providing an insider’s view to the fictional milieu and events can function both as an alienating device and a key to interpretation. In other words, a focalizing character acts as a mediator between the reader and the story. I utilize the concepts of experiential iconicity as defined by Tabakowska (1999) and Wolf (2001), and iconicity of absence as present by Wolf (2005). 

The first chapter of Ali Smith’s episodic novel, Hotel World (2002 [2001]) provides an interesting example of the personal experiences of characters affecting the structuring of a storyline. The narrative in the chapter is focalized through the spirit and the body of a dead girl, whose ways of experiencing shape the story into reflecting the way the fictional reality appears to them as individuals. The perspective of characters situated in an unusual relation to the otherwise everyday world represented in the chapter is made explicit by showing which aspects of the world are within their reach, and which are not. Observations on the use of experiential iconicity and iconicity of absence are, therefore, able to reveal that the story as related in the chapter would not have been the same if narrated through the perspectives of characters in some other focalizing positions, or by a narrator positioned outside the fictional reality.

My analysis of the functions of experiential iconicity and iconicity of absence in the first chapter of Hotel World brings forth questions on the role of other varieties of iconicity present in the text. The composition of the narrative situation with the juxtaposition of the reader’s experience of the world and the fantastic elements of the fictional reality create a linguistically marked text, which provides an opportunity to examine the way language may be used in constructing reality.

 

 

Iconicity as Intermedial Concept 

Christer Johansson

Stockholm University 

 

In my paper I discuss and analyse the concept of iconicity from an intermedial perspective. The field of iconicity is divided along the following lines: primary and secondary (or mediated) iconicity; obligatory and optional iconicity; complete and partial iconicity. These distinctions and their intersections are related to the Peircian trichotomy image, diagram and metaphor, and applied to the three main media of narrativity and fictionality, prose fiction, fiction film, and drama. Some examples:

1) Cinematic narratives are characterized by primary iconicity, that is, all meaning and fictional content is dependent on the iconic relation between the sign vehicle and the depicted content. The iconicity of prose fiction and drama is, by contrast, secondary, mediated by (different kinds of) conventional sign relations.

            2) The dramatic stage and the image-and soundtracks of film narratives represent icons, identity signs and dummies, representing fictional characters, objects, and events. Moreover, the meaning of the filmic and the dramatic depictions is related to the fictional content by a default-principle: we presuppose, in the absence of indications to the contrary, that the things we see and hear correspond to fictional truths. The literary narrative does not represent iconic signs, like identity signs and dummies, but is sometimes in itself a dummy, that is, an imitation of some kind of non-fictional discourse type or genre, a phenomenon very rare in cinematographic and dramatic contexts. 

3) Prose fiction, fiction film and drama are united by a kind of obligatory diagrammatic iconicity, a default-principle, correlating sign vehicle and fictional content. The (temporal) order of the elements of the sign vehicle corresponds, as long as no indications to the contrary emerge, with the order and causality of the fictive events and existents. 

 

 

 

Iconic Superstructure and Its Metaphorical Extension in Sign Language Poetry

Michiko Kaneko

University of Bristol

 

This paper explores the way that metaphoric meaning is generated through the iconic properties of sign language poetry, concerning the overall contextual force and individual elements that build up the symbolism of the poems. 

Most analysis of metaphor and iconicity in sign languages has been made at the lexical level, using single signs in the established lexicon (Taub 2001, Wilcox 2000). However, many sign language poems do not use distinct lexical items, but rather are characterised by a continuous flow of ‘productive’ signing (in which signs are created ad hoc, using a range of highly visual phonological elements). Therefore it is essential to work at the sub-lexical level, where iconic elements are most salient.

            Metaphorical interpretation of the poem often takes place as a result of combination of iconic sub-lexical elements. In other words, metaphorical meaning is not inherent in the signs. What is inherent in the forms of the signs is iconicity - and purely iconic signs become metaphorical when situated in certain poetic context. For example, the configuration of the hand which visually represents the act of holding an apple (with “claws at joints”) is completely neutral in non-poetic context, but starts to bear negative meaning when lined up with other signs with “claw” handshape (such as a crawling snake) in the poem, “Garden of Eden”. Such imposition of symbolic value across the signs is an example of “iconic superstructure” proposed by Demey, Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen (2008). Building on this notion of iconic superstructures and the contextual force that drives them, I will explore how sub-lexical parameters (such as hand shape, location, movement, and palm orientation) are used systematically to contribute to the overall symbolism of the poem. 

            Examples will be drawn from existing poems and stories in British Sign Language (BSL).

 

 

Language and Iconicity in Foreign Language Course Books: Intersemiosis and Rhetoric in Polysemiotic Signs 

Evangelos Kourdis

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

 

In this paper I study the relation between language and iconicity in the polysemiotic signs of foreign language course books in Greece. More precisely, I  examine the polysemiotic signs that are composed of verbal signs (utterance) that introduces activities or exercises in the foreign language course books, and plastic signs (images, color, graphics, proxemics), within the context of Groupe μ (1992). 

My analysis consists of three stages. The first stage has to do with the pair of foreign languages, English and French, in order to examine if culture is a factor that affects the synthesis of the polysemiotic sign, and in particular that of the visual sign. Second, I compare and contrast the polysemiotic signs in the English and French course books written and published by the Greek state for the needs of Greek students. Furthermore, the selection of these course books was based on the principles of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, and Assessment (CEFR) which focus on the sociolinguistic competence and on the socio-cultural elements in foreign language teaching. 

I am also interested in examining if the polysemiotic systems are characterized by rhetoric features and functions, such as hooking or redundancy in accordance with R. Barthes’s work. Finally, I demonstrate that redundancy is not only a verbal phenomenon, but also a non-verbal one by drawing to what Jakobson (1959) calls intersemiotic translation, the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.

 

 

Iconically Expressible Meanings in Proto-Indo-European Roots

Tatiana Kozlova 

National University of Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine

 

For a long time the arbitrariness of correlation between sound and meaning was assumed by many linguists. With the evidence of iconicity provided by numerous researchers, this assumption has been challenged. Intriguing observations of Proto-Indo-European word structure were made by M. M. Makovsky (2007) who suggested that distinction be made between external and internal PIE word arrangement and discovered the semantic valence of blocking, tabooing, totemic and catalyzing elements in proto forms. V. V. Lewickij (2008) applied quantitative analysis to prove the sound symbolic features prevalent in PIE roots. 

Assuming iconic traces in the pattern, my considerations will rest on basic insights of studies on naturalness in language. This paper examines the unresolved issues of correspondence between form and content in PIE roots, namely, the ways by which the phonetic structure of root basic forms and their modifications reflects extralinguistic reality, and also mobilizes the semantic development of PIE etymons.

The research was performed in the following stages: (i) 450 most productive PIE roots were selected out of etymological dictionaries (Pokorny 1959, Watkins 2000, Lewickij 2010) and (ii) categorized according to their type of structure (e. g. C_{voiced aspirate stop}VC_{voiced aspirate stop}, or CV_longC/ CV_shortC, etc); (iii) because forms and meanings of PIE roots are hypothesized reconstructions, we also had to rely upon the semantic similarities and dissimilarities of the directly derived cognates in order to interpret form-meaning correlations in the etymons’ basic and modified forms.

The results obtained demonstrated that:

-PIE root structure tends to weaken toward its terminal and maps the left-to-right decrease in information value;

-some symmetric root patterns correlate with the concept of ‘conformity’, whereas asymmetric ones deal with ‘cessation’ or ‘prolongation’;

-final modifications of asymmetric root (CVC_{unvoiced stop > voiced stop > continuant}) reveal ‘gradation’; 

-medial vocalic lengthening (CV_short>longC) appears to be indicative of ‘maximization’ while medial vocalic shortening (CV_long>shortC) results in ‘minimization’;

-adjacent and non-adjacent transpositional modifications (metatheses) are mappings of ‘reverse/twist’ and ‘reciprocity’;

-reduplications point to ‘intensity’ and ‘iteration’.

Given that the iconic potential of language may have been well intuited by Proto-Indo-Europeans, further research into the iconic features of archaic systems may shed light on how more sophisticated languages developed.

 

Multimodality and Video Advertisements: The Building of Verbal/Visual Metaphors

Rodrigo Esteves de Lima-Lopes 

Faculdade Cásper Líbero-São Paulo/Brasil

 

This paper, part of my ongoing PhD research, aims at studying metaphors based on both visual and verbal codes in a corpus of 9 videos. These videos are part of Apple Inc.’s “Get a Mac” campaign and were streamed through the Internet from 2006 through 2010. The main theoretical background lies on the multimodal analysis (Iedema, 2001; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; van Leeuwen, 2001; van Leeuwen, 2005; van Leeuwen, 2007), a socio-semiotic approach that assumes language as a set of social choices motivated by the context they are in (Halliday, 1978; Halliday, 1985; Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The videos were analysed by means of a multimodal concordancer. Results show that there are a number of metaphorical strategies, choices that humanise computer issues, making them more understandable for the average person. Some of those metaphors can be seen here as iconisation of computer users, mostly through stereotypes. 

Keywords: Metaphor; Multimodality; Socio-Semiotics, Advertisements. 

 

 

The Diagrammatic Nature of Maps 

Christina Ljungberg

University of Zurich

 

That maps are such useful instruments for cognitive exploration lies, in part, in their capacity to engage the cognitive potential of their interpreters in so far that, in order to function as maps for orientation, they create mental images. This potential is based on the diagrammatic structure of maps, which combines the map’s indexical functions with its iconic qualities. Diagrammatization involves both likeness and analogy, which makes the map an efficient tool not only for charting unknown territories but also for making visible structures and new relationships that no verbal description could reveal.          

But what makes maps such excellent tools for exploration is their potential to expand the field of possibilities and thus enable novel experimentation. Like words and other symbols, mnemonic images and other heuristic devices, they are also means of probing yet uncharted fields of the imagination: maps seem to inspire ventures into new realms within practices of writing and the arts, on the one hand, and the cartographic impulse, on the other. That is what we will explore by looking at how writers and artists incorporate essential characteristics of maps and mapping into their works, which they investigate and problematize in order to explore new knowledge space and to develop new ways in which to articulate both the potential and the limitations of representation and our human predicament.

 

 

 

Argumentative and Iconic Strategies in Italian Opera.

Costantino Maeder

University of Louvain

 

For more than three centuries, Italian opera depended on one simple, basic structure that relied mainly on two basic, iconic strategies. This structure corresponds to a recitative followed by an aria, sung by one or more characters that participated at the recitative. As a variant, the basic structure is replaced by / transforms into? an opening choir (or an ensemble of choir and singing characters). This is often the case at the beginning of an act or a new drama? opposition of recitative and aria determines the composition and libretto writing without big changes and fulfills important argumentative and manipulative objectives. Apparently, this basic structure meets very complex, cognitive exigencies, as the long lasting success of Italian Opera confirms, a success that virtually banned any other dramatic form from the scenes of the peninsula: it offers a cognitive framework that enables the audience to follow and understand a complex artistic object that combines music, drama, and staging.

Mostly the aria section undergoes some slight changes: from a simple two parts and three parts structure, it evolves to a more dynamic one, the so-called multi-sectional aria, usually formed by an introduction, a cantabile, a transition, and the final cabaletta. However, the main opposition of recitative and aria remains in place. This reflects two distinct iconic strategies: the recitative imitates the prosody of spoken language, while the aria, with its repetitions and anti-prosodic features, refers to the diagrammatic rendition of human linguistic behavior (the repetition of words, syntagmas,sentences, and couplets, for instance, alludes to the commonplace that people, because of stress or strong emotions, cannot control their linguistic output). These opposing iconic strategies are often linked to simple axiological systems: during the Eighteenth Century, the recitative relates to truth and the attempt to communicate, whereas the aria relates to subjectivity, to the interruption of dialogue and to the unilateral dismissal of the principle of cooperation, as Grice would put it.

In this talk, I will elucidate, how these structures and iconic strategies work, how a poet and a composer take advantage of this basic structure and of its iconic premises, and what the gradual evolution of these structures and iconic strategies reveal about the different epochs (Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism). It will be shown as well, how such simple means could generate so many masterpieces for more than three hundred years.

 

 

Performative Iconicity? The Peculiar Case of Books Which Cannot Be Just Read

Grzegorz Maziarczyk

The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

 

In the vast majority of cases, the only physical activity a book requires from the reader is that of turning over the pages. However, some literary texts are published in a manner which forces the reader to perform other extranoematic actions. For instance, B.S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunatesis in fact a book in a box, in which chapters are unbound, and the reader can decide on the sequence in which he/she will read them. Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions is, in turn, designed in such a way that it appears to literally consist of two stories, which run from the opposite ends of the book in shrinking print. This novel has two front covers and no back cover, with every single page containing ‘upside-down’ sections. In order to read Only Revolutions the reader has to turn the book around: the publisher’s note recommends that he/she should alternate between the two stories, reading eight pages at a time.

The paper will seek to demonstrate that the actions the reader is expected to perform while reading such books reflect their thematic concerns and that the iconic effect thus achieved cannot be easily described in terms proposed by standard theories of iconicity. In both imagic and diagrammatic iconicity the signifier is assumed to be a static element whose form is to be correlated conceptually by the interpreter with its signified. Books like The Unfortunates or Only Revolutions endow the signifier and consequently the whole iconic relationship with a dynamic, extranoematic element: the physical action resulting from the interaction between the interpreter and the material form of the signifier becomes a reflection of the process which on the linguistic level of the book can only be represented by means of arbitrary verbal symbols. As the title indicates, the paper will propose the category of performative iconicity as a tentative designation for the situation in which the actions the interpreter is supposed to perform on the material form of the signifier can be correlated with its meaning. 

 

 

Harmony of the Linguistic and the Visual: Unison and Counterpoint 

Makiko Mizuno 

University of Tokyo 

 

Language as a creative medium has been an essential part of fine art since the beginning of the 20th century and there exist various kinds of visual works that employ linguistic elements as a central device for expression. One of the most important formal specialities of such works is the emphasis on the interrelation of the linguistic and the visual within the artwork. If an observer is cognitively aware of both objects, there is always some kind of interaction between the linguistic and the visual; however, in most cases it is not explicit. For example, handwriting affects the aesthetic reception of the linguistic content more or less, but the effect is usually too subtle to explain. The experimental artworks in the 20^th century, which are often called "intermedia", make this interrelation explicit. My talk is about the way in which such works of art make the interrelation between the linguistic and the visual explicit. There are two different approaches: Unison and Counterpoint. Some works use the linguistic and the visual in a way that stresses the semantic or structural similarity between them (Unison), whereas other works rather stress the difference of the meanings expressed by the linguistic and the visual (Counterpoint). Each approach adopts different compositional strategies. In the works of Unison, the level of abstraction in terms of both the visual and the linguistic is kept rather high: In other words, they are neither visually nor literally representational. On the other hand, the linguistic and the visual in the works of Counterpoint is rather concrete, so that the difference in meaning between them stands out and can be detected by the viewer. It is important to note that these two approaches are complimentary and not exclusive. Neither approach will work when the implications of the linguistic and the visual are completely identical, or when a viewer finds no connection between the two. Works that emphasize the interrelation between the visual and the linguistic are therefore all based onsimilarity and difference, whichever approach they may employ. 

In my talk, I will discuss examples such as "Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht (1918)" by Paul Klee and "The Treachery of Images (1929)" by René Magritte. 

 

 

The Effects of Interactivity on Iconicity in Digital Environments

Hans Mooijer

University of Amsterdam

 

Research on visual iconicity has thus far focused mainly on printed works. Being an inherently static medium, print does not allow for language to be represented in anything but a fixed state, bound as it is by the shackles of ink on paper. Since a few decades, however, digitized text has been superseding print as a medium for language representation. So-called digital environments, in which text can be represented in new ways hitherto deemed unthinkable, could have a profound effect on the way we read and interpret text. 

            One of these digital environments is Gregory Weir’s (2009) Silent Conversation, a game that involves ‘reading’ already existing texts, such as H.P. Lovecraft’s The Nameless City, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by touching all the words in them with an icon for the reader, the so-called ‘I’-avatar. These words are able to move and are positioned with little regard for the way they would have looked like in traditional print form. Weir’s (2009) Silent Conversation shows what this digital medium can do to otherwise non-iconic prose and poetry: through the dynamism and interactivity associated with this digital medium, iconic forms flourish suddenly with great intensity. 

            This new dynamism and interactivity also provide ample opportunity for re-evaluating what iconicity really is. What would happen to exophoric iconicity if the boundaries between the diegetic world of a digitized text and the external, referred world would fade away, as seems to be the case in digital environments at times? What would happen to experiential iconicity if the reader would be interactively engaged with the same choices as those of the character, sharing the same subjective consciousness? If experiential iconicity can be shared between a character and reader through the interactive retracing of steps, what would happen if there are no such characters and the reader would be directly addressed or iconized and it is the reader him-/herself that has to make the choices in a narrative, both as an external and internal element of the text (as the actual, referred reader in the real world and the ‘controlled’, in-game representation of the reader respectively)? Would that still be considered to be experiential iconicity? These rather abstract questions and more can be raised in a medium that treats text as a dynamic and fluid phenomenon that is, most importantly, easily manipulated by means of interactivity. These questions and related in-game iconic examples in adapted, digitized text will be the focus of my paper and talk.

 

 

 

The Phono-Articulatory Spaces of French and Italian as Different Logical-Semantic Spaces

Luca Nobile

University of Provence

 

1. In agreement with recent hypothesis of neurolinguistics, I already proposed a model to describe the sensori-motor interface between signifier and signified in Italian. I would now extend the model to include a comparison with French. In this paper, I will discuss some preliminary issues of this research. First, I will briefly illustrate some aspects of my theoretical and methodological framework, in particular the fact that signifier and signified are considered as differential values. This implies that comparing languages means not comparing two set of relationships between sounds and concepts, but comparing two sets of relationships between a differential network of sounds and a differential network of concepts. The goal is not to demonstrate a priori that languages behave similarly when combining sounds and concepts, but rather to understand a posteriori how and why they behave differently. The choice of two sister languages such as French and Italian has thus many advantages. 

 

2. Second, I will comparatively describe the architecture of French and Italian phonological systems. Indeed, in a differential perspective, what we are interested in is not so much the sensorimotor quality of each phoneme, as the oppositional geometries the phonemes mutually maintain by their distinctive features within the phono-articulatory space. Concerning vowels, French has a more complex system than Italian. The space divided by Italian into 7 phonemes using 2 distinctive features ([aperture, place]) is divided by French into 16 phonemes using 4 distinctive features ([aperture, place, nasality, labiality]). Conversely, concerning consonants, Italian has a more complex system than French: where French distinguishes 20 phonemes by 4 distinctive features ([aperture, place, nasality, voicing]), Italian distinguishes 35 phonemes by 5 features ([aperture, place, nasality, voicing, intensity]). Overall, French is characterized by a proliferation of vocal oppositions which involves peripheral phonatory organs and give rise to ternary geometries (e.g., [non-rounded-front : front-rounded : back-rounded]). Conversely, Italian is characterized by a multiplication of consonant oppositions involving changes in strength and duration and giving rise to binary geometries ([single : geminate]). The aim of the research is to show that theese phono-articulatory differences have some deep and precise logical-semantic correlates. 

            3. The third preliminary step is to set up the corpus. The basic criteria concern the phonological classification of the lexicon. I will give just a first illustration of french vowel monophonemes (V). The most important regularity which emerges from the analysis is that rounded phonemes tend to give rise to items of the nominal group : au, on, aux, eau, haut, eaux, os, hauts, houx, houe. Conversely, verbs are usually front, orals and non rounded phonemes : est, a, ai, es, ait, aient, aie, hais, aies, hait. This regularity can be summarized by the formula [nominal_group : verb] = [rounded : not_rounded]. This can be compared with the formula obtained in a similar way for Italian [nominal_group : verb] = [closed : open]. This is the way the model allows formalising phonosemantic comparison between languages.

 

 

Iconicity in Indian Ragamala Tradition: Multimodality, Translation, and Transformation

Priyadarshi Patnaik

IIT Kharagpur 

 

The ragamala miniature painting tradition of India (16^th-17^th century AD) is unique in that it constitutes a series of paintings which is expected to evoke musical themes known as ragas in the connoisseur through the sequence of unfolding or viewing of the images. This refers to the tradition of singing or performing continuously a chain or garland (mala) of ragas that refer to specific times of day and night and are sung in consonance to that time and/or evoke the ambience or feeling of that time. The paintings refer to these temporal markers as well as to meditative texts about each raga (or musical theme) known as dhyanaslokas (written and codified by the 13^th century AD in books on music) that a musician is expected to meditate upon and visually evoke. In a sense the dhyanaslokas embody the musical essence of that specific raga. Thus, the ragamala paintings – which often contain these texts above or on the side of the painting – work on the principle of resemblances of visual elements, of temporal sequences (since the paintings are arranged in the sequence in which the ragas are to be performed), of multimodal translation to recreate music visually. How does this complex translation, which involves texts, music and images, take place? To what extent is the process conventional and arbitrary, and to what extent is it iconic? How do forms and meanings interact, echo, resemble and simulate one another? And since more than one mode is involved – where do forms mime forms – say musical sequence and painting sequence – and meaning mimes meaning – say in translating the visual components of the meditative texts into images? What role does iconicity play in our various art forms and the way they are linked to one another in the plasticity of their translatability? Literature translated/transformed into other art forms in the Indian context seems to use iconicity to a large extent, but is the reverse true? The paper wishes to address these issues by taking the ragamala tradition as a case study and by also referring to Indian philosophy of language where different traditions (say mimamsa vs. nyaya) debate the natural or arbitrary character of language.

 

 

Playing with the Senses: Camera-Eye Blends in Film, Literature and Theory 

Christian Quendler

University of Innsbruck

 

This paper revisits the historical development of camera-eye conceptions from programmatic metaphors of novel forms of literary and filmic composition (e.g. Dziga Vertov’s aesthetic program of the kino-eye or John Dos Passos’ camera-eye sections in U.S.A.) to transmedial narratological concepts (e.g. Marie-Laure Ryan’s notions of ‘camera’ and ‘narrative screens’). This development comprises an intermedial chain of feedback loops between literary and filmic uses of the camera eye in both theory and practice. In the same way that literary camera-eye narratives have evolved historically through dynamic exchanges with cinema and film theory, literary narrative theories have responded to the history of such intermedial exchanges. In this development the heuristic value of the camera eye shifted from gauging media-specific assumptions to providing new models of conceptualizing narrative subjectivity in general. While this may seem as if film eventually challenged the literary hegemony in cinema studies, it did so, perhaps, only indirectly. The increased currency of visual and filmic metaphors in narratology rather reflects the growing impact of cognitive sciences, where new technologies have always played a prominent role in conceptual models. Theories of attention and cognitive mobility have a long tradition of drawing on cinematic terms such as ‘zoom lenses,’ ‘moving spotlights,’ and ‘close-ups.’ Conversely, film theory and practice have equally long and close ties with cognitive and experimental psychology. The figure of the camera eye is central to such cross-mappings between the arts, criticism and science. Drawing on Mark Turner’s and Gilles Fauconnier’s blending theory, this paper examines the iconic work that configurations of the camera eye have performed in establishing productive analogies and disanalogies on representational and conceptual levels. I will analyze the premises that inform this shift in camera-eye metaphors from prescriptions of media-specific art practices to theoretical descriptions of intermedial techniques and transmedial conceptualizations of storytelling. I will conclude with some of the theoretical ramifications these reconceptualizations entail. 

 

 

Diagrams and the Diacritical Sign: The Case of Deleuze

Maria Ribeiro

Sao Paulo Catholic University

 

According to Agamben (2000), there are some elements that suggest a certain punctuation philosophy in Deleuze’s works. Thus, some graphic signs (hyphen, reticence, and colon, for example) would execute a strategic function in the texts of the French author. This paper is interested in the observation of diagrams, which are icons of a specific type, elaborated from arbitrary signs. The object of analysis is the short L'immanence: une vie (Deleuze, 1995), published by the philosopher in Philosophie magazine. I will also discuss some symbols, considered conventional,  under another perspective, namely how something that means what will be interpreted as its meaning {?} (Ransdell, 2003). Such a perspective allows us to understand how the laws of representation can determine an object according to the quality order inherent to the icon. 

 

 

On the Role Played by Iconicity in the Placement of Adverbial Satellites in 

Spoken Dutch

Jonah Rys and Ludovic de Cuypere 

Ghent University FWO-Vlaanderen, Ghent University 

 

The iconic principle of proximity, which states that “the distance between linguistic expressions may be an iconically motivated index of the conceptual distance between the terms or events which they denote” (Haiman 1983: 781) has been applied to several topics morphosyntactic research (e.g., Bybee 1985). 

In this talk, we look at the influence of the principle of proximity on the ordering of adverbial satellites. It is widely contended that this order is at least partially motivated by the semantic relation between the satellites and the main verb. Accordingly, “how” something is done is considered as semantically more relevant to the verb than “where” or “when” it is done. Thus, in SVO languages (e.g., English), manner satellites tend to be placed closer to the main verb than place satellites, which in turn appear closer to the verb than time satellites (cf. the “manner-place-time”-rule). In Dutch, an SOV language, the opposite order is observed (Haeseryn et al. 1997). Two other factors are additionally said to influence satellite placement: length (shorter satellites tend to be placed before long ones) and the old-before new principle. Importantly, these non-iconic principles are generally considered to “overrule” the proximity principle (Haeseryn 1997: 1246). However, this claim is not backed by empirical evidence, and thus remains speculative. 

Building on Dik et al.’s (1990) typology of adverbial satellites, we extend the traditional scope of research and investigate the relative order of 8 different satellite classes. In contrast to previous studies, which heavily rely on self-constructed examples, our approach is fully corpus-based, with data drawn from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Corpus of Spoken Dutch). Our results corroborate the hypothesis that the proximity principle indeed influences the order of satellites, which suggests that the role of iconicity is more important than traditionally assumed. 

 

 

Iconic Relations Between Drawings Produced with the Aid of the Sense of Touch and Vision: A Comparative Analysis

Marcelo Santos

University of Sao Paulo/ University of Toronto

 

Studies developed through the last years (Kennedy, 1992; 1997; 2006; Sköld, 2007) demonstrated not only that people bearing congenital blindness are able to express by means of a pictorial language – for example through drawings in relief – but also that visual and touching signs produced by blind people are very similar to those created by people that can see. In this work, we will retake this discussion from an experience accomplished in São Paulo Modern Art Museum – Brazil -, from April to December 2010. A group of ten people, including common individuals presenting blindness as well as psychiatric patients elaborated for eight months some drawings and woodcuts that seem to confirm in some way the iconic relation in terms of image, diagram and metaphor levels (CP 2.227) between representations conceived from visual stimulation and the sense of touch. 

 

Key words: iconic relations, drawings, sense of touch, vision

 

 

The Iconicity in Cummings’ Poem “Bright”

Mírian dos Santos, Luicana Coutinho Pagliarini de Souza, and Maria Ogécia Drigo

University of Sorocaba (UNISO)

 

In this talk we present a semiotic analysis of “Bright”, a poem by E. E. Cummings. The analysis will be based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1839–1914), speculative grammar, aimed at showing how the word, usually, predominates as a symbol, in this poem it goes through graphic deconstructions and thus the similarity relation with the sign object (poem) becomes clear, in other words, the poem emerges as an icon [difficult structure]. The relevance of these ideas is the possibility of showing that the verbal language may get rid of the conventional and the arbitrariness. 

 

Key words: “bright”, symbol, icon

 

 

Iconicity in Roland Giguère’s Hybrid Works

Dianne Sears

University of Massachusetts 

 

The work of the Québécois poet and painter Roland Giguère (1929-2003) presents an especially rich case of iconicity. Not only a poet and painter, but also an engraver, typographer, editor and founder of the influential Erta Press which published numerous Québécois livres d’artiste, Giguère was acutely aware of the iconic potential of literary language in all its dimensions—visual, verbal, structural, and semantic. This paper explores the iconic characteristics of selected hybrid works taken from Forêt vierge folle (1978) and Paroles Visibles of 1983 (reprinted in Temps and Lieux of 1988), while exploring the tensions between literary and artistic expression in these works.   I use the term “hybrid works,” to designate the picture poems which Giguère called variously “poem-drawings,” “collage poems” and “graphic poems” in Forêt vierge folle, as well as the twelve serigraphs of Paroles Visibles which present a complete integration of poetry and drawing, each serigraph functioning as both a poem and an artwork and capable of being received as each by the reader/spectator. Drawing on the works of Max Nänny and Anne C. Henry, I will pay particular attention to the role of letters and punctuation, particularly the ellipsis, and analyze the ways in which Giguère, the master typographer, fully exploits their iconic possibilities to create multifaceted levels of meaning in these works.  I argue that Giguère’s particular emphasis on letters ties into his perception of a cultural shift from language to images, from “letters” (both printed matter and literature) to visual media.

 

 

Sound-Shape-Emotion Iconicity in Visual Psychomimes in Japanese

Kazuko Shinohara, Fusanosuke Natsume, and Yoshihiro Matsunaka

Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Gakushuin University, and Tokyo Polytechnic University

 

This study explores the three-fold iconicity between sounds, letter shapes, and emotional meanings observed in visual representation of mimetics (onomatopoeia) in Japanese manga (comics).

Mimetics and sound symbolism, which have long been regarded as peripheral in the study of language under the influence of the Saussurean arbitrariness hypothesis, have recently gained attention in cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as linguistics (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001, Berlin 2006, Shinohara and Kawahara 2010, etc.). Japanese has an elaborated system of mimetics that consists of three subgroups: phonomimes, which describe physical sounds, phenomimes, which describe the shape, movement, and other states of physical objects, and psychomimes, which describe a person’s feelings, emotions, or attitudes, all of which provide examples of iconicity. In addition, Japanese mimetics are often represented visually in manga with variation in shapes and decoration of letters. These visual properties of letters seem to be iconically related with the meanings of the words. 

On the basis of the above, we explore iconic relationships observed in Japanese mimetics in manga, especially psychomimes. We argue that sounds of the word, letter shapes, and emotional meanings the word represents are iconically related. Specifically, we analyze (1) the correspondences between phonetic oppositions in consonants (obstruents like [p, b, t, d, k, g, s, z] vs. sonorants like [m, n, r, y, w]) and the emotional meanings and nuances (intense, sudden evocation of emotion vs. soft, gradual evocation or duration of emotion), and (2) the association between the emotional nuances (as the above) and the shapes or decorations on letters (jaggy spines, patterns of cracks, etc. vs. round shapes). We use various works of Japanese manga as the source of data and demonstrate these iconic associations by showing examples. In all, the sound-shape-emotion association in psychomimes in Japanese manga is mediated by iconic motivations. 

 

 

Breaking Glass: Sound Figurativity in Audiovisuals

Lucio Spaziante 

University of Bologna

 

The thesis of this paper is based on highlighting the role of figurative sound, inside audiovisual sphere, notably in science-fiction cinema, specifically investigating the relationship between sound, mimesis, perception and reference. 

In audiovisual media, in fact, we tend to attribute the figurative role, only to the visual image, forgetting that even the sound element has a figurative component. Audiovisual synchresis, actually, has historically developed a semiotic relationship between image and sound, where strong conventional elements can be detected. We recognize sounds to be truthful, effective, and fitting not so much if they reproduce what would be heard in the same situation in reality, but if they renderthe associated feelings. (Chion, 1990) The world of film and commercials, e.g. produce continuously a sound “figurativity” useful to convey meanings, atmospheres, discursive configurations. Sound therefore has skilled figurative capacities using strategies of imitation, often close to pure expressionism: from sounds of glass associated with the Resurrection in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, to para-organic sounds in Star Wars, Matrix and Wall-e. So, “concrete” is real, but is also ambiguous, blurred, “open” and imprecise: it is the sphere of imperfection (Greimas, 1987). Sound in audiovisuals often proposes grid reading of reality, through sound “formants”, which have a relation of negotiation with reference and perception. Starting with "real", "organic” and "concrete" sounds we keep developing abstraction and recombination to create a completely rebuilt semiotics of sound.

 

 

Video: An Audiovisual Medium

Yvonne Spielmann

University of the West of Scotland

 

As widely known, video is an electronic medium like television. It emerged with a new technology of portable equipment (recorder, camera, monitor) in the late sixties and became a new tool to artists, musicians, performers and also for alternative television. From early on, artists collaborated with engineers to develop applications and also construct tools that were specific to video processing with the idea to develop a video aesthetic of its own. They were searching for an electronic vocabulary that would be different from the means of expression of sound and image in film and television and other visual arts. This approach is clearly intermedial. In addition, it was possible to use audio tools such as synthesizers to process the video signal and also transform audio into video and vice versa.This may be conceived as multimodal. I will show some examples of the early phase of experimentation with video tools and video performances and videotapes that demonstrate the audiovisual characteristics and the steps to establish an aesthetic language proper to the medium.

 

 

Model as Icon

Wendy Steiner

University of Pennsylvania

 

At a time when the explosion of new media has brought the relation between reality and the virtual to mass attention, the model has become a persistent theme in contemporary literature, visual art, and film.  The model straddles the divide between the real and the virtual in a highly dramatic fashion.  In the case of an artist's model, for example, we have a figure whose very job is to simulate in her physical body the look of an image.  That image is conveyed, in turn, by a work of art created to resemble her.  Many would argue that an artwork that resembles its model signifies her as well, has her as one of its denotata.  This claim is particularly convincing if the model is a portrait subject, when clearly the portrait signifies its model by virtue, at least in part, of its resemblance to her.  The model would seem then to be a particular subcategory of the icon.

The twentieth-century avant garde resisted modeling as a signifying process and even as a studio procedure.  Modernists tended to identify the aesthetic with a different sort of iconicity.  In classic structuralist formulations, the principle of likeness functions formally, internally, with elements of the work resembling each other in a system of cross-references so intricate and often unexpected that the work is like a super-icon, raising semiosis on the basis of similarity to an abstract theme in its own right.  The turn away from modernism has reinstated the "external iconicity" of the model, i.e., an iconicity in which indexicality is an essential factor.  The aesthetic is correspondingly redefined as a result, with the previous, exclusive focus on the Jakobsonian "message" shifted to those elements of the communication diagram that belong to the real:  audience, artist, contact, and the referent--with its arch-indexical-iconic case, the model.        

 

 

Diagrams in Poetry

Frederik Stjernfelt

University of Aarhus

 

This talk gives an introduction to Peirce's doctrine of diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning - exemplified in the poetry of the Danish poet Klaus Høeck.

Peirce's doctrine of diagrams takes them to be relational icons by means of which thought experiments may be made. Diagrams in this broad sense occur also in lexical semantics - but graphical diagrams close to maps and construction diagrams may also be used in poetry. The Danish poet Klaus Høeck forms an examle of that - I shall present and discuss some of his diagrammatical poems. Constructed in Danish, they are untranslatable, but I shall explain their structure in detail in the talk. 

 

 

Thick and Thin in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”

Etienne Terblanche

North West University

 

Studies of iconicity in literature have been paying fair (although not exhaustive) attention to the modernist poet E. E. Cummings (Heusser, Webster, Terblanche), but little if any to his contemporary poet T. S. Eliot.  The iconic study of his poetry beckons from the poems themselves. For instance, The Waste Land employs onomatopoeia, accentuated blank space, and a Sanskrit patterning which mimes wholeness. As part of a larger project that is in the process of examining Eliot’s iconic limits and values, this paper briefly puts into focus one aspect of responding to the poet in this manner.  It makes an iconic reading of his minor 1920 poem “The Hippopotamus” against the actuality of concrete being on earth. The sound-forms in this poem, it will be posited, carefully mime the ironic twist that it carries with regard to matter, materialism, earthly being, and the notion of spiritual eternity.  The poem plays significantly with [Λ]- and [I] sounds as well as [OI], [eI], and [Ɗ], generally attaching the lower-pitched sounds to the hippo and the higher ones to the church. But this is done ironically, so that organic disgust related to the hippo—and carried by the iconic sound [Λ] in particular—is shown to be celestial, while the church’s shrill celestial aspirations are shown to be dubious and stagnant.  At some stages (notably stanzas 7 & 8), this size-sound-symbolism (naming) switches to its opposite conditions with fine modernist ease, as will be demonstrated. This has the effect of breaking the irony to show that the poem means business when it says that the hippo enjoys the true spirit.  

Overall, “The Hippopotamus” ironically suggests that the materialistic church will not go to heaven, while the material and hoarse flesh and blood hippo will. The said sound-symbolic device carefully imbues this irony with concrete poetic meaning, as the paper will conclude: a singular imagic iconicity is at work which mimes the actual sizes of the spiritual conditions. And this evolves, so to speak, into a diagrammatic iconicity which mimes the process of going to heaven.  The paper concludes that even in the echelons of “high” modernist poetry the iconicity of size-sound symbolism plays a vital, creative role, and one infers that the generic notion that modernism in poetry is “deracinated” from nature (Jonathan Bate 2000) needs to be critically revisited, while the study of iconicity, as in the case of this poem, provides an exact avenue for the pursuit of this important revisitation.

 

 

 

Iconicity in Gotochi-kitii “Localized Hello Kitty”  

Kiyoko Toratani

York University

 

This paper is concerned with small Japanese souvenirs (e.g., key chains) called gotochi-kitii ‘localized Hello Kitty’ (GK henceforth). Because each prefecture has its own version and there are multiple subtypes, there are now more than 1,000 kinds of GK in Japan (Gentee­kitii-hogosha-kai 2008). In a simple case, GK is a combination of two iconic representations:  gotochi ‘local specialty’ and Hello Kitty, a character produced by the Japanese company Sanrio. For example, Hokkaido-hamanasu-kitii comprises two iconic figures, hamanasu ‘sweetbrier’ (a regional flower of Hokkaido), and Kitty which holds onto the stem of the flower. Most GK, however, are much more complex. This paper analyzes how GK images are constructed from a cognitive linguistics perspective, arguing that (i) they are the manifestations of the conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Hiraga 2005) of Kitty and a chosen item of gotochi ‘local specialty’ and (ii) their conceptual integration is on a continuum, with one end constructed from the KITTY IS AN AGENT metaphor and the other employing the KITTY IS AN UNDERGOER metaphor (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

The model I assume contains four mental spaces (Fauconnier and Turner 2002):  two Input spaces, Generic space, and Blended space. Metaphorical mapping takes place between the two Input spaces (Hiraga 2005), with one input space containing the image of Kitty, and the other containing the image of gotochi ‘local speciality'.

 

In one common type of GK, Kitty acts as an agent, playing the role of a human who represents gotochi ‘local specialty’. In ringo-musume-kitii (Apple Girl Kitty), the Apple Girl, who is a promoter of apples, the local produce of Aomori prefecture, is mapped onto Kitty. In this process of conceptual integration, the Generic space contains the schematic image of an animate’s body, and the Blended space projects the image of Kitty as an Apple Girl who carries an apple and dons the traditional Apple Girl’s costume, kimono and head scarf. In this creative blended image, the apple promoter is shrunk to the size of the apple, thereby enhancing the cuteness of Hello Kitty.

In another common type, Kitty appears as an undergoer manipulated or contained by the gotochi ‘local specialty’. In the case of nerima-daikon-kitii (Daikon Radish Kitty of Nerima), a radish is mapped onto Kitty;  the Generic space contains the schematic image of an oval shape (the radish and Kitty), and the Blended space shows Kitty buried in the radish with the face (eyes, nose, whiskers) and the paws barely showing. In some cases, Kitty projects an image of both an agent and an undergoer simultaneously.

As a souvenir item, GK is an iconic representation of ‘localized Kitty’ (GK). The internal composition, however, is complex, involving the intricate interplay of the two concepts, gotochi ‘local specialty’ and Kitty. The present analysis corroborates Hiraga (2005) who argues for the conceptual integration model wherein iconicity interacts with metaphor.

 

References

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner, 2002. The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. NY: Basic Books.

Gentee-kitii-hogosha-kai (ed). 2008. Gotochi-kitii hisutorii bukku. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Hiraga, Masako. 2005. Metaphor and iconicity: a cognitive approach to analyzing texts. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London: The University Chicago Press.

 

 

Iconicity as a Byproduct of Conceptual Blending

Mark Turner

Case Western Reserve University

 

For all animals other than human beings, the scope of thought is quite small.  It is restricted to understandings for which the species was directly evolved, and also restricted to quite local situations.  Frogs understand frog stuff.  Rodents understand rodent stuff.  Chimpanzees understand chimpanzee stuff.  No species except for our own appears to be able, even with constant and dedicated human support, to move more than a fraction beyond its natural evolutionary mental landscape. Of course, evolution can build instincts that have long-range consequences, as when the beaver builds a dam, or any animal migrates to a mating ground it has never seen.  But these instinctive behaviors are not a matter of wide-scope conceptual understanding.  Human beings have such instincts: a human being does not need to understand principles of metabolism, nutrition, and anatomy running over time in order to feel specific hunger or specific thirst here and now, nor does a human being need to contemplate the eventual benefits of great-grandchildren in order to feel lust.  But human beings, unique among species, are able to manage and manipulate diffuse networks of conceptual thought.  The scope of human thought is vast: it runs far over space, time, agency, modality, and intentionality.  Intriguingly, it has been proposed recently that our capacity for such thought was, evolutionarily, the result of an increase in working memory.  But the details of these proposals actually show that a crucial step was the evolution of the ability to blend such a diffuse mental network into a single mental conception that, far from being diffuse, is quite congenial to human thought.  The diffuse network is packed to the congenial blend, and we unpack from the congenial blend to the diffuse network.  Mentally, we can hold onto the blended space.  It is a tractable mental space.  Accordingly, the blend serves as a mental platform upon which the thinker can stand, a mental home which the thinker can inhabit.  From this congenial blend, the thinker can hold, manage, manipulate, and construct a network of wide scope that would otherwise lie beyond our mental capacity.  The meaning distributed across the network of wide scope is keyed to the meaning in the congenial, packed blend.  This keying of network-scale meaning to the human-scale meaning of the packed blend occurs throughout human cognition, and is one of our most important mental abilities.  It occurs in domains where the word “iconicity” is not a common term of analysis: in mathematics, reasoning, decision-making, advanced social cognition, navigation, and so on.  But this operation of packing to a blend and unpacking to a network is also a basis of what is known as “iconicity” in language and literature, as this lecture will explore.

 

 

The Iconized Alphabet: French Lettrisme and Russian Cubo-Futurist Experiments

John J. White

King’s College

 

The main purpose of this paper is to compare some of the principal ways in which two important 20^th-century literary movements played with the possibilities of using individual letters of the alphabet to advance beyond the calligramme’s iconically organized strings of words and sentences and, in the Cubo-Futurist context, to exploit the allegedly iconic shape of given letters peculiar to the Cyrillic alphabet. The approach will involve close readings of individual poems and ingenious local effects in order to juxtapose and contrast the avenues explored by the post-1945 French lettristes with Russian Cubo-Futurism’s attempts to create radically innovative experimental modes of language revitalization. The focus will be on Viktor Khlebnikov’s and Alexei Kruchenykh’s experiments, assessed alongside the subsequent work of the founding French lettriste poets. All examples will be given in translation and explained in English

 

 

Iconicity in the Prose Romances of William Morris and the Paintings of Edward Burne-Jones

David Glyn Wilson, 

University of Neuchatel

 

Lifelong friends William Morris (writer, designer and revolutionary socialist) and Edward Burne-Jones (Pre-Raphaelite painter) had certain things in common: both had been intended for the church, studying theology together at Oxford, but in the end each chose instead to devote their lives to art and a quest for beauty amid the increasing ugliness of Victorian industrialism. Their verbal and visual art expresses some of this commonality of vision: for example, whether in words or in paint, each portrayed intense relationships between men and women, often set in fantastic landscapes and appealing for inspiration to medieval, Arthurian, or other ancient themes. These highly-charged portrayals of human relationships are generally iconic and metaphorical in relation to various circumstances of their production. But despite commonalities and even close collaboration between the two artists, there are important differences. Whereas Morris the socialist explored in his late prose romances the idea of the individual and his/her role in relation to the community,  Burne-Jones’s vision tended to focus more on intense individual experience, sometimes reflecting  elements in his own life, such as his ill-fated amour fou with the sculptress Maria Zambaco. Notwithstanding these differences in focus, both artists in their own ways create iconic moments in their art, in which body posture and movement, or even suspension of movement, are significant.

       Despite the portrayal of human relationships by these two artists, the characters in Morris’s romances and the figures in Burne-Jones’s paintings have a kind of universality rather than the sort of individual psychological complexity often found in contemporaneous late-nineteenth century novels, for example. The significance of this frequently-made observation for the iconicity of their works will be investigated.

This paper takes a cognitive poetic approach, including Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) blending theory and Lakoff’s (2006) cog hypothesis. It also takes up Bolens’s (2008) ideas on embodied cognition in literature and visual art, in seeking to explore the iconicity of the words and images of Morris and Burne-Jones.

 

 

 

 

Parallelism and Chiasmus in Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” (1982)

Yusuke Yamada

Rikkyo University

 

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Dillard, wrote an interesting essay, entitled “Living like weasels” (1988[1982]), in which she depicts an encounter between “I” and a weasel.  The purpose of this presentation is to analyze Dillard’s clever use of rhetorical devices such as parallelism and chiasmus, and to illustrate how these forms of expressions function as icons for the story line of the essay: an encounter and a parting of the weasel and “I”. The paper tries to argue that a short encounter of the animal and the narrator is a pivotal moment, that the worlds before this moment and after it are differently perceived by the narrator, that this perception is not only expressed in words but also embodied by words, and that iconicity plays an important function even in a non-fiction essay such as this.

Firstly, there are six instances of parallelism and chiasmus at the level of sentences in the essay.  Three come before the pivotal moment; three after it.  The former three instances describe similar actions or locations of “I” and the weasel in symmetrical forms; namely, by chiasmus or parallelism, which uses the same words or exact antonyms.  By contrast, the latter three express a change of the relationship between the weasel and “I” in somewhat deformed symmetry, i.e., with partial parallelism or covert antonyms.  This is a clear case of iconicity, particularly, of what Hiraga (2005) calls ‘structural diagram’: coherence of form represents coherence of content; incoherence of form represents incoherence of content.  

Secondly, there is another interesting use of parallelism in this essay, which consists of six parts.  Dillard starts each part with either one of the two words -- “I” or “weasel”. However, the arrangement of their repetition is asymmetrical: [weasel–I–weasel–I–I–I].  The lack of the symmetrical sequence seems to indicate two things: (1) an asymmetrical relationship between “I” and the weasel; and (2) the plot of the essay, in which there is no longer a “locked” relationship between “I” and the weasel after the animal suddenly disappears in the middle of part three.  This is again a clear case of iconic structure: the arrangement embodies the plot.  

It is concluded that parallelism and chiasmus manifest themselves as an icon, both at the level of sentences and the level of textual structure, to reinforce the force of Dillard’s unique portrayal of the encounter of the weasel and “I”.  

Traditionally, parallelism and chiasmus have been discussed as rhetorical devises of verse texts (cf. Nänny, 1986).  However, it will be shown in this paper that the roles and functions of parallelism and chiasmus in prose texts comprise an interesting issue for further research on iconicity.

 

 

Iconicity and the Role of Typography in the Visual Interpretation of Verbal Signs 

Evripides Zantides

University: Cyprus University of Technology, 

 

Iconicity between the oral and the written interpretation of a specified sign is equally multimodal but depends on different parameters. While in parole the iconicity of a sign can be influenced by tone of voice, duration, pause, body-language or connotative meaning, correspondingly, the written interpretation of a sign depends on a factor whose power on signification and meaning is often being neglected or misunderstood, and that is, the use of typography. When visualizing oral text, the multimodal nature of typography tolerates different levels of iconicity and might also influence meaning. Because of the design, layout, usage and historical background of letterforms, typography and graphic elements play an important role in the similarity or analogy between the literal/mental meaning of a word and its written/visual appearance. Typography assigns femininity, masculinity, emphasis, anger, urgency, warning and many more, in addition to the linguistic meaning. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which written signs make use of Typography to achieve different levels of iconicity, and it will try to introduce the notion of ‘intericonicity’ in visual communication. In doing so, it will compare oral to verbal representation of signs, and also discuss how iconicity of a verbal sign changes when the medium of communication is different. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Program 

 

Thursday June 16

8.00–9.20                  Registration (M-house)

9.20–9.40                  Welcome (M1083)

9.40–10.40                Keynote 1 (M1083)

10.40–11.10  Coffee (M-house)

11.10–12.30  Session 1 (M1083); session 2 (M1049)

12.30–13.30  Lunch (Restaurant Kristina)

13.30–15.30  Session 3 (M1083); session 4 (M1049); session 5 (M1051)

15.30–16.00  Coffee (M-house)

16.00–17.20  Session 6 (M1083); session 7 (M1049)

 

Friday June 17

9.00–10.00                Keynote 2 (M1083)

10.00–10.30  Coffee (M-house)

10.30–12.30  Session 8 (M1083); session 9 (M1049); session 10 (M1051)

12.30–13.30  Lunch (Restaurant Kristina)

13.30–15.30  Session 11 (M1083); session 12 (M1049); session 13 (M1051)

15.30–16.00  Coffee (M-house)

16.00–17.00  Keynote 3 (M1083)

 

Saturday June 18

9.00–10.00                Keynote 4 (M1083)

10.00–10.30  Coffee (M-house)

10.30–12.30  Session 14 (M1083); session 15 (M1049); session 16 (M1051)

12.30–13.30  Lunch (Restaurant Kristina)

13.30–15.30  Session 17 (M1083); session 18 (M1049); session 19 (M1051)

15.30–16.00  Coffee (M-house)

16.00–17.00  Panel (M1083)

19.00                         Banquet (Stadshotellet)

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome

Lena Fritzén, Vice-chancellor of Linnaeus University

Lars Elleström, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg, conference organizers

 

Keynote 1

Masako K. Hiraga, The Basho Code: Iconicity in Haiku

Chair: Lars Elleström

 

Keynote 2

Mark Turner, Iconicity as a Byproduct of Conceptual Blending

Chair: Olga Fischer

 

Keynote 3

Wendy Steiner, Model as Icon

Chair: Christina Ljungberg

 

Keynote 4

Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrams in Poetry

Chair: Christina Ljungberg

 

Session 1

Sign Language and Gestures I

Daniella Aguiar and Joao Queiro, Hypoicons in Intersemiotic Translation

Marianne Fallon, When the (De)form(ed) Tries to Mimic Meaning: From Gloucester to King, in Carmelo Bene’s Riccardo III (read by Constantino Maeder)

Chair: Jac Conradie

 

Session 2

Second Language Learning, Teaching, and Translation

George Damaskinidis, Mediating Between the Verbal and the Non-Verbal Semiotic Element: Multimodal Semiotics Translation in Practice

Evangelos Kourdis, Language and Iconicity in Foreign Language Course Books: Intersemiosis and Rhetoric in Polysemiotic Signs 

Chair: Olga Fischer

 

 

Session 3

Typography, Punctuation, and Lay-out I

Maria Ribeiro, Diagrams and the Diacritical Sign: The Case of Deleuze

Dianne Sears, Iconicity in Roland Giguère’s Hybrid Works

Makiko Mizuno, Harmony of the Linguistic and the Visual: Unison and Counterpoint

Chair: Christina Ljungberg

 

Session 4

Relations Between Text, Music and Moving Images I

Jens Arvidsson, A Sounding Visual Text in Motion: The Title Sequence and Intermedial Iconicity

Mikael Askander, Iconicity and Music Videos

Nicola Dusi, The Degrees of Indetermination in Intersemiotic Translation

Chair: Costantino Maeder

 

Session 5

Theoretical (Linguistics, Semiotics, Intermediality) I

Jui-Pi Chien, Is There A Theory of Aesthetics in Saussure?

Lars Elleström, Spatiotemporal Aspects of Iconicity

Christer Johansson, Iconicity as Intermedial Concept 

Chair: Yvonne Spielmann

 

Session 6

Typography, Punctuation, and Lay-out II

John, J. White, The Iconized Alphabet: French Lettrisme and Russian Cubo-Futurist Experiments

Evripides Zantides, Iconicity and the Role of Typography in the Visual Interpretation of Verbal Signs 

Chair: Christina Ljungberg

 

Session 7

Sign Language and Gestures II

William J. Herlofsky, By Hook or By Crook: How Various Multimodal Iconic Expressions can be Motivated by One Simple Image

Michiko Kaneko, Iconic Superstructure and Its Metaphorical Extension in Sign Language Poetry

Chair: Jac Conradie

 

 

Session 8

Visual Iconicity and Images in Poetry I

Annette Almgren White, Interpretation of Photopoetry: Mirroring a Subjective Approach or a Two-Eyed Reader?

Marthinus Beukes, The Iconicity of Suicide as Antidote: Elegiac Poems by Tom Gouws

Paolo Dainotti, Visual Iconicity in Latin Poetry

Chair: Lars Elleström

 

Session 9

Sound Symbolism I

Kimi Akita, Iconicity in Mimetic Grammar 

Kazuko Inoue, Multimodality of Onomatopoeia: A Consideration on the Semantic Extension of Adverbial Onomatopoeia in Japanese 

Mahe Avila Hernandez, To draw a bow   引.: A dimension of iconicity in metaphor variation at the level of linguistic instantiation

Chair: William J. Herlofsky

 

Session 10

Blending Theory and Cognitive Poetics

David Glyn Wilson, Iconicity in the Prose Romances of William Morris and the Paintings of Edward Burne-Jones

Christian Quendler, Playing with the Senses: Camera-Eye Blends in Film, Literature and Theory

Kiyoko Toratani, Iconicity in Gotochi-kitii “Localized Hello Kitty”

Chair: Jui-Pi Chien

 

Session 11

Visual Iconicity and Images in Poetry II

Martin Heusser, Essence and Entropy: Iconicity in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings 

Mírian dos Santos, Luicana Coutinho Pagliarini de Souza, and Maria Ogécia Drigo, The Iconicity in Cummings’ Poem “Bright” 

Yuka Yoshioka, Verbal Image / Visual Image in Canadian Poetry

Chair: Lars Elleström

 

 

Session 12

Sound Symbolism II

Luca Nobile, The Phono-Articulatory Spaces of French and Italian as Different Logical-Semantic Spaces

Etienne Terblanche, Thick and Thin in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus”

Kazuko Shinohara, Fusanosuke Natsume, and Yoshihiro Matsunaka, Sound-Shape-Emotion Iconicity in Visual Psychomimes in Japanese

Chair: William J. Herlofsky

 

Session 13

Theoretical (Linguistics, Semiotics, Intermediality) II

Alexanne Don, “Mode-Bleeding”: When Intermediality Includes an Interpersonal Dimension

Christina Ljungberg, The Diagrammatic Nature of Maps

Marcelo Santos, Iconic Relations Between Drawings Produced with the Aid of the Sense of Touch and Vision: A Comparative Analysis

Chair: John, J. White

 

Session 14

Relations Between Text, Music and Moving Images II

Sebastiano Ferrari, On Some Simple Iconic Strategies in Concept Albums within the Italian Singer-Songwriter Tradition

Panu Heimonen, Iconicity in Music Analysis

Costantino Maeder, Argumentative and Iconic Strategies in Italian Opera

Chair: Etienne Terblanche

 

Session 15

Grammar and Word Order

Jac Conradie, Grammar-Internal Mimicking

Tatiana Kozlova, Iconically Expressible Meanings in Proto-Indo-European Roots

Jonah Rys and Ludovic de Cuypere, On the Role Played by Iconicity in the Placement of Adverbial Satellites in Spoken Dutch

Chair: Kimi Akita

 

 

Session 16

Hypermedia and Multidimensionality

Izabel Goudart, Iconic Graphic Flow: Diagrams for Imaginative Cognition

Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Performative Iconicity? The Peculiar Case of Books Which Cannot Be Just Read

Hans Mooijer, The Effects of Interactivity on Iconicity in Digital Environments

Chair: Yvonne Spielmann

 

Session 17

Relations Between Text, Music and Moving Images III

Priyadarshi Patnaik, Iconicity in Indian Ragamala Tradition: Multimodality, Translation, and Transformation

Lucio Spaziante, Breaking Glass: Sound Figurativity in Audiovisuals

Yvonne Spielmann, Video: An Audiovisual Medium

Chair: Costantino Maeder

 

Session 18

Text and Images in Advertising

Antonio Roberto Chiachiri and Edson P. Pfützenreuter, The Creation of Interpretants from an Iconic Sign: An Advertising Case 

Rodrigo Esteves de Lima Lopez, Multimodality and Video Advertisements: The Building of Verbal/Visual Metaphors

Maria Ogécia Drigo, Iconicity/Indexicality in Advertising: The Power of Suggestion on the Scene

Chair: Ludovic de Cuypere

 

Session 19

Verbal Narrations

Heidrun Führer, Iconic Coding Principles in A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories

Ritva Itkonen, Characters Constructing Reality: Experiential Iconicity and Iconicity of Absence in Ali Smith’s Hotel World

Yusuke Yamada, Parallelism and Chiasmus in Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” (1982)

Chair: David Glyn Wilson