Search results for "iconicity"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Towards understanding nonmanuality : A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements
2019
This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers’ head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements—such as nodding and shaking the head—may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicalit…
La Grammaire de Condillac face au paradoxe de l'origine naturelle du langage
2012
The recent discovery of mirror neurons has rivived the gestural-imitative theory of the origin of language advocated by Condillac in the XVIIIth century. Condillac develops this theory in two stages: in the Essai (1746) he proposes a gestural theory based on the arbitrariness of the sign, while in the Grammaire (1775) he refuses arbitrariness and accepts the theory of analogy and natural imitation proposed by Charles de Brosses (1765). This choice depends on the fact that in Rousseau (1755) and Beauzee (1765) arbitrariness, as a "paradox of the original contract", now plays the role of key argument in favor of the divine origin of language. So, the theory of analogy and natural imitation is…
Iconicity in grammar chinese
2014
The notion of iconicity has become an interesting topic in the Western cognitive linguistics today. We chose to study the problem of iconicity in the context of Chinese grammar. Like any "ideographic" language, the Mandarin Chinese reveal a high degree of iconicity by his writing. In the history of Chinese linguistics, many studies have been done on the similarity between the form of the Chinese character and the sense which it represents. However, we only began to develop the notion of iconicity in the phonetic and syntactic domains with the introduction of cognitive linguistics in China thirty years ago. In this thesis, we will develop the notion of iconicity in the grammar of Chinese in …
Iconicity and semantics in sinographic typology
2022
From the 1980s, the notion of iconicity is frequently used in linguistics to describe the motivated relationship between the forms of the object and their meanings. Over the past hundred years, researchers from various countries have successively discovered iconic relationships between specific linguistic structures and structures of human experience, observable phenomena in various languages. As an ideographic script, linguistic studies always consider Chinese script as a special case compared to other scripts in linguistic study. Therefore, the problems of iconicity are mentioned much less regarding Chinese writing. In fact, by discovering the origin of the characters of this writing, we …
Mutual intelligibility among the sign languages of Belgium and the Netherlands
2015
AbstractIn an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part of Belgium (Flemish Sign Language, VGT), the southern part of Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language, LSFB), and the Netherlands (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), we tested the comprehension of VGT by signers of LSFB and NGT. In order to measure the influence of iconic structures (classifier constructions and constructed action) that linguistic analyses have shown to be similar across different sign languages, two genres were compared: narrative and informative signing. To investigate the effect of the overlap between the spoken languages surrounding the Dutch and Flemish Deaf com…
Formal Variation and Language Change in Catalan Quantifiers : the Role of Pragmatics
2020
This article studies the formal variation of the masculine singular forms of the quantifiers u/un 'one', algú/algun 'someone, some', ningú/ningun 'no-one, anyone, not one, any, none' and cada u/cada un 'everyone, each one' in contemporary Catalan. The standard uses of these forms are contrasted with dialectal uses, obtained from a thorough search in oral and written corpora. In addition, they are compared with the uses in the other Romance languages and with their historical evolution in Catalan. The whole set of data, and especially the dialectal information on the Valencian area, allow us to explain the various factors that have interacted in the variation and formal change of these quant…
Homeostasis in school science: analysis of the subject and results of a proposal for classroom work
2016
El trabajo presenta un breve repaso del nacimiento del concepto de homeostasis en la historia de la fisiología. Se ha realizado un estudio de aula con estudiantes de tercer curso de secundaria apreciando las dificultades que estos presentan para construir una visión holista del concepto de homeostasis. La ciencia escolar porta una iconicidad múltiple, derivada del lenguaje experto, que en muchos casos se revela como un obstáculo para el aprendizaje de los estudiantes novatos. Siendo la homeostasis un concepto básico en la estructura del curriculum nacional se hace una llamada para ahondar en su investigación didáctica.
Introduction : formes de l'iconicité
2014
International audience; L'emploi du terme "eikon" pour désigner une forme linguistique fonctionnant comme une image est aussi ancien que la tradition linguistico-grammaticale de l'Occident. Il figure en effet pour la première fois dans le Cratyle de Platon (439a), point de départ de cette tradition. Pour Platon, qui ne distingue pas encore entre signifiant et signifié, il est raisonnable d'affirmer que le nom, dans son ensemble, et jusqu'à ses éléments phonologiques, opère comme une image de la chose signifiée, ce qui constitue du reste une bonne raison pour s'en méfier et préférer la connaissance directe des choses à celle de leurs représentations. La reprise du terme "icon" dans la pensée…
Clausal coordination in Finnish Sign Language
2016
This paper deals with the coordination of clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Building on conversational data, the paper first shows that linking in conjunctive coordination in FinSL is primarily asyndetic, whereas in adversative and disjunctive coordination FinSL prefers syndetic linking. Secondly, the paper investigates the nonmanual prosody of coordination: nonmanual activity is shown both to mark the juncture of the coordinand clauses and to draw their contours. Finally, the paper addresses certain forms of clausal coordination in FinSL that are sign language-specific. It is suggested that the sign language-specific properties of coordination are caused both by the fact that signe…
Charles Nodier et la linguistique des origines
2014
International audience; Du point de vue de l'histoire des idées, Charles Nodier occupe une position doublement importante. Il est l'auteur du premier livre en français contenant le mot « linguistique » dans le titre et il est le premier président de cet Institut des Langues qui, le 21 décembre 1839, deviendra la première « Société de Linguistique » française. Si on s'en tenait à ce critère strictement lexicologique, on ne manquerait donc pas d'arguments pour affirmer que Nodier a joué un rôle clé dans l'apparition de la linguistique en France. Peu de linguistes accepteraient pourtant aujourd'hui de souscrire à une pareille affirmation. Pour la plupart d'entre eux, la linguistique ne se mani…