Cognitive iconicity: Conceptual spaces, meaning, and gesture in signed language

Adopting the framework of cognitive grammar, I define cognitive iconicity as a special case in which the phonological and the semantic poles of a symbolic structure reside in the same region of conceptual space. One reason for the richness of iconic representation present in signed languages is that the phonological pole of signs involves objects moving in space as viewed from a certain vantage point: hands moving in space as viewed by the signer and the observer. The study reports cross-linguistic data which provide evidence for how cognitive iconicity is extensively manifest in signed languages, not just lexically but also in morphology, grammatical classes, and autonomous–dependent relations in hand–face constructions. I also propose that cognitive iconicity illuminates the relation between gesture and language, and the process by which linguistic structures arise from gestural sources. A re-examination of arbitrariness and iconicity from a cognitive iconicity perspective suggests that the two can coexist, since both are reflections of a deeper, underlying cognitive basis of language.