Metaphor and Iconicity attempts to clarify the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in the creation and interpretation of spoken and written texts from a cognitive perspective. There are various degrees in which metaphor and iconicity manifest themselves, ranging from sound symbolism and parallelism in poetic discourse to word order, inflectional forms, and other grammatical structures in ordinary discourse. The book makes unique contributions to the study of the relationship of form and meaning.
What is the role of meaning in linguistic theory? Generative linguists have severely limited the influence of meaning, claiming that language is not affected by other cognitive processes and that semantics does not influence linguistic form. Conversely, cognitivist and functionalist linguists believe that meaning pervades and motivates all levels of linguistic structure. This dispute can be resolved conclusively by evidence from signed languages. Signed languages are full of iconic linguistic items: words, inflections, and even syntactic constructions with structural similarities between their physical form and their referents' form. Iconic items can have concrete meanings and also abstract meanings through conceptual metaphors. Language from the Body rebuts the generativist linguistic theories which separate form and meaning and asserts that iconicity can only be described in a cognitivist framework where meaning can influence form.
The discovery of the importance of sign language in the deaf community is very recent indeed. This book provides a study of the communication and culture of deaf people, and particularly of the deaf community in Britain. The authors' principal aim is to inform educators, psychologists, linguists and professionals working with deaf people about the rich language the deaf have developed for themselves - a language of movement and space, of the hands and of the eyes, of abstract communication as well as iconic story telling. The first chapters of the book discuss the history of sign language use, its social aspects and the issues surrounding the language acquisition of deaf children (BSL) follows, and the authors also consider how the signs come into existence, change over time and alter their meanings, and how BSL compares and contrasts with spoken languages and other signed languages. Subsequent chapters examine sign language learning from a psychological perspective and other cognitive issues. The book concludes with a consideration of the applications of sign language research, particularly in the contentious field of education. There is still much to be discovered about sign language and the deaf community, but the authors have succeeded in providing an extensive framework on which other researchers can build, from which professionals can develop a coherent practice for their work with deaf people, and from which hearing parents of deaf children can draw the confidence to understand their children's world.
As she explains, "If the iconic influence that surrounds metaphor is set aside, the results will be greater understanding and interpretations that are less opaque."".
This new study is a major contribution to sign language study and to literature generally, looking at the complex grammatical, phonological and morphological systems of sign language linguistic structure and their role in sign language poetry and performance. Chapters deal with repetition and rhyme, symmetry and balance, neologisms, ambiguity, themes, metaphor and allusion, poem and performance, and blending English and sign language poetry. Major poetic performances in both BSL and ASL - with emphasis on the work of the deaf poet Dorothy Miles - are analysed using the tools provided in the book.
This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example, the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.
Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework’s application to media and multimodality analysis.
An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.
The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.
