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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 44:1 (2020) ► pp.95–131

Iconicity in syntax and the architecture of linguistic theory

| University of Reading
ORCID logo | Palacky University

Linguistic iconicity has been studied since ancient times (e.g., Plato’s Cratylus, see Cooper & Hutchinson 1997). Within modern grammatical description, this notion was mostly developed by Jakobson and Benveniste; nowadays, iconicity in language is even being experimentally tested (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016; Diatka & Milička 2017). However, most studies on linguistic iconicity pertain to prosody, sound symbolism, or morphology; syntactic iconicity has been vastly underexplored. In this paper, we present two hypotheses concerning syntactic iconicity: (1) syntactic descriptions of natural language strings have an inherent structure which is isomorphic to that of representations in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system; or (2) linear order imposed on phrase structure is isomorphic to that in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system. We will argue in favour of the former, which constitutes a novel perspective on iconicity in grammar. We furthermore discuss the place that iconicity may have in the architecture of a generative system.

Keywords: iconicity, linguistic theory, syntax, transformational grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Some preliminary remarks
  • 2.Empirical support for iconicity in grammar
    • 2.1Iconicity in the category of verbal aspect in Czech
    • 2.2The limitation of the role of linear order in the expression of Case
  • 3.Order in grammar and iconic relations: Two hypotheses and four theories
  • 4.Previous approaches: A critical assessment
    • 4.1The generative approach: Newmeyer (1992)
    • 4.2Haiman’s distance-based approach
  • 5.Architectural concerns in transformational frameworks
  • 6.Towards a formal definition of iconicity
    • 6.1Revising the architecture of grammar: How to capture iconicity
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.19017.lac
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