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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics
Iconicity As An Organizing Principle Of The Lexicon, Erin E. Campbell, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Elana Pontecorvo, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmorey, Naomi Caselli
Iconicity As An Organizing Principle Of The Lexicon, Erin E. Campbell, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Elana Pontecorvo, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmorey, Naomi Caselli
Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research
The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to …
Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo
Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo
Linguistics ETDs
In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and …
A Data-Driven Approach To The Semantics Of Iconicity In American Sign Language And English, Bill Thompson, Marcus Perlman, Gary Lupyan, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmory
A Data-Driven Approach To The Semantics Of Iconicity In American Sign Language And English, Bill Thompson, Marcus Perlman, Gary Lupyan, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmory
Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research
A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has …