31.2563, Calls: Cog Sci/Greece

Thu Aug 13 15:40:54 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2563. Thu Aug 13 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2563, Calls: Cog Sci/Greece

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Lauren Perkins, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Joshua Sims
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Lauren Perkins <lauren at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2020 11:40:04
From: Ian Joo [ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk]
Subject: Iconicity in prosaic lexicon

Full Title: Iconicity in prosaic lexicon 

Date: 31-Aug-2021 - 03-Sep-2021
Location: Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Ian Joo
Meeting Email: ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science 

Call Deadline: 08-Nov-2020 

Meeting Description:

Iconicity, the resemblance between form and meaning, has been left largely
peripheral in mainstream linguistics, which has viewed languages – spoken
languages, at least – to be a set of arbitrary signs between sound and meaning
within a logical system.

Ideophones, however, have been treated as an exception to this rule of
arbitrariness. Although uncommon in Indo-European languages, ideophones
consist a heavy portion of lexicon in languages of East Asia, Africa, and
other parts of the world (Dingemanse et al., 2016). While few doubt that
ideophones are iconic by nature to some degree, there has been a common
assumption that there exists a more or less clear boundary between ideophones
and non-ideophonic words (referred to as prosaic words), rather than a
continuum ranging from the most iconic words to less iconic ones.

Recent progress in research, however, has proven iconicity to be a pervasive
character in prosaic words as well. Patterns of iconicity can be found in
words denoting speech organs (Urban, 2011), spatial deixis (Johansson &
Zlatev, 2013), persons (Nichols & Peterson, 1996), and – as more recently
demonstrated – a sizeable set of basic meanings (Blasi et al., 2016; Johansson
et al., 2020; Joo, 2020). And the iconic character of prosaic words also
functions as pressure driving language change (Johansson & Carling, 2015).
Thus, it is now evident that a language do not divide its vocabulary into
iconic and non-iconic words: ideophones do not monopolize iconicity. Prosaic
words may arguably be less iconic than ideophones, but they are certainly not
void of it.

This brings us to an interesting research topic, to which papers are called
for:
1. To what degree and in what manner are prosaic words (non-ideophonic words,
such as mountain or butterfly) iconic? 
2. How does the iconicity of prosaic words influence language change?
3. How does iconicity in prosaic words influence how we perceive and produce
everyday speech?

Call for Papers: 

Please send your abstract (in pdf format) to ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk for a
20-minute presentation. An abstract may not exceed two pages, including
references. Please send your abstracts by 8 November 2020. The provisional
acceptance of abstracts will be communicated to you by 20 November 2020, after
which the accepted abstracts will be submitted to the organizers of the 54th
Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2021).

References: 
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen,
M. H. (2016). Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of
languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America, 113(39), 10818–10823.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1605782113
Dingemanse, M., Schuerman, W., Reinisch, E., Tufvesson, S., & Mitterer, H.
(2016). What sound symbolism can and cannot do: Testing the iconicity of
ideophones from five languages. Language, 92(2), e117–e133.
Johansson, N., Anikin, A., Carling, G., & Holmer, A. (2020). The typology of
sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic
features. Linguistic Typology, ahead of print.
Johansson, N., & Carling, G. (2015). The De-Iconization and Rebuilding of
Iconicity in Spatial Deixis: An Indo-European Case Study. Acta Linguistica
Hafniensia, 47(1), 4–32.
Johansson, N., & Zlatev, J. (2013). Motivations for Sound Symbolism in Spatial
Deixis: A Typological Study of 101 Languages. The Public Journal of Semiotics,
5(1), 3–20.
Joo, I. (2020). Phonosemantic biases found in Leipzig-Jakarta lists of 66
languages. Linguistic Typology, 24(1), 1–12.
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0030
Köhler, W. (1947). Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in
Modern Psychology. Liveright. 
Nichols, J., & Peterson, D. A. (1996). The Amerind personal pronouns.
Language, 336–371.
Urban, M. (2011). Conventional sound symbolism in terms for organs of speech:
A cross-linguistic study. Folia Linguistica, 45(1).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2563	
----------------------------------------------------------