37.3569, Confs: Theme Session at ICLC18: Iconicity Between Specificity and Universality Across Languages and Modalities (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3569. Fri 30 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3569, Confs: Theme Session at ICLC18: Iconicity Between Specificity and Universality Across Languages and Modalities (Germany)

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Date: 29-Oct-2026
From: Maria Flaksman [maria.flaksman at uni-bamberg.de]
Subject: Theme Session at ICLC18: Iconicity Between Specificity and Universality Across Languages and Modalities


Theme Session at ICLC18: Iconicity Between Specificity and
Universality Across Languages and Modalities
Short Title: ICLC18 Iconicity TS10
Theme: Iconicity between specificity and universality across languages
and modalities

Date: 20-Aug-2027 - 24-Aug-2027
Location: Erlangen, Germany
Meeting URL:
https://www.iclc18.fau.de/academic-program/theme-sessions/#ts10-iconicity-between-specificity-and-universality-across-languages-and-modalities

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; General Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 08-Dec-2026

Linguistic iconicity, the perceived resemblance between aspects of
linguistic form and meaning (Winter, Woodin & Perlman 2025), has moved
from the margins of linguistic theory to a central concern, especially
with regard to the multimodality of language (Dingemanse, Perlman &
Perniss 2020). Its growing prominence raises a fundamental comparative
question: to what extent are iconic mappings shaped by recurrent
properties of human perception and cognition, and to what extent are
they specific to particular languages, communities, and modalities?
Additionally, research on iconicity in world languages (spoken as well
as signed) provides an important insight into the language origin and
evolution, as iconic signs (words, gestures) are the only elements in
the languages system created ex nihilo.
This theme session approaches this question by “zooming in” and
“zooming out” on iconicity. Zooming in invites contributions that
focus on the microscopic iconic molecules of meaning, i.e., highly
conventionalized, language- and modality-specific ways of iconically
construing experience. For example, iconically motivated phonaesthemes
(Sidhu 2025) in a particular language or affordances present in
certain iconic signs but lacking in others (Tsang & Perniss 2026).
Zooming out invites telescopic comparison across languages and
modalities, making it possible to identify recurrent perceptual,
articulatory, spatial, and structural correspondences. For example, a
semantic map for the sensory domains of ideophones (Van Hoey 2023), an
implicational hierarchy (Dingemanse 2012), general mechanisms of
de-iconization, i.e., form- meaning similarity loss due to language
change (Flaksman 2017), or sensitivity to sound symbolism across
modalities (Ćwiek et al. 2022).
Organizers:
Aleksandra Ćwiek (Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń, Poland)
Maria Flaksman (Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany)
Thomas Van Hoey (FWO & KU Leuven, Belgium)
Bringing cognitive typology into dialogue with multimodal approaches,
the session welcomes contributions on:
 - lexical iconicity, ideophones, onomatopoeia, mimetics
 - iconicity in signed languages and gesture
 - ineractions among vocal, manual, visual, and other bodily resources
 - sound symbolism, phonaesthemes, perception of words or sounds as
iconic
We encourage contributions that embrace the extremities of zooming
completely in, or zooming completely out – exploring either
language-specificity or language universality of form-meaning
mappings. We particularly welcome contributions that engage in the
dialogue between these two perspectives.
Key questions include:
1.      Which iconic mappings recur across languages and modalities,
and which are language- or modality-specific?
2.      At what level of granularity can iconic patterns be compared:
individual forms, phonological or articulatory features, semantic
domains, image-schematic correspondences, or broader semiotic
strategies?
3.      How do modality-specific affordances shape iconic construal?
4.      What should a cross-linguistic typology of iconicity classify:
forms, mappings, semantic domains, construal strategies, or
combinations of these?
5.      What is the relation between the linguistic signs and the
phenomena of the extra-linguistic reality they depict?
By bringing together cross-linguistic and cross-modal perspectives,
the theme session aims to identify where recurrence and variation in
iconicity reside. Zooming in and out across linguistic systems can
reveal how embodied experience, construal, and modality shape
recurring form-meaning correspondences, contributing to a cognitively
grounded typology of iconicity.
Selected References:
Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu,
Dan Dediu, Katri Hiovain, Shigeto Kawahara, et al. 2022. The
bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
377(1841). 20200390. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390.
Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of
ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10). 654–672.
Dingemanse, Mark, Marcus Perlman & Pamela Perniss. 2020. Construals of
iconicity: Experimental approaches to form-meaning resemblances in
language. Language and Cognition 12. 1–14.
https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2019.48.
Flaksman, Maria. 2017. Iconic treadmill hypothesis: The reasons behind
continuous onomatopoeic coinage. In Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer,
Olga Fischer & Christina Ljungberg (eds.), Iconicity in Language and
Literature, vol. 15, 15–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.02fla.
Sidhu, David M. 2025. Sound symbolism in the lexicon: A review of
iconic-systematicity. Language and Linguistics Compass 19(1). e70006.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70006.
Tsang, Vanessa Wing Yan & Pamela Perniss. 2026. What’s seen as iconic
in a sign and what’s not? Evidence from iconicity ratings by signers
and non-signers on the HKSL lexicon. Language and Cognition 18. e53.
https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2026.10103.
Van Hoey, Thomas. 2023. A semantic map for ideophones. In Thomas Fuyin
Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics: Vol 2, 129–175. Leiden:
Brill. 10.1163/_006.
Winter, Bodo, Greg Woodin & Marcus Perlman. 2025. Defining iconicity
for the cognitive sciences. In
Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language, 138–150. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.


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