Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form-to-meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development, and communication: systematicity facilitates category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help to explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure

Ideophones and depictive constructions: Towards an explanation of functional overlap

This thesis attempts to account for the functional overlap that exists between ideophones and depictive secondary predicates. Discussions of depictives are largely absent from the functional and typological literature, and there is much still to elucidate with regard to the typology of ideophones. The thesis identifies the commonalities and differences between ideophones and depictives at each level of linguistic structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) with reference to a genetically and areally diverse sample of languages. I argue that this functional overlap is due to a similarity in pragmatics, whereby both depictives and ideophones occur relatively infrequently and thus are used to signal information that is in some way unexpected and thereby catch a listener’s attention. It is manifested through similarities in semantic domains and word classes: depictives and ideophones typically encode states, which are often evoked through an appeal to the senses and tend to be conveyed through the same word classes in different languages. The thesis provides an illustration of the interrelatedness of different levels of structure and most significantly how pragmatic considerations have consequences for semantics and syntax