Conceptual Spaces and Embodied Actions
Conceptual Spaces and Embodied Actions
This chapter examines evidence for the ubiquity of iconicity in signed languages, a consequence of their transmission in the visual medium. Adopting a cognitive grammar framework, the iconic representation of space and time in signed languages is described. Iconicity is understood not as a relation between language and the external world, but as a mapping within multidimensional conceptual space, between the semantic and phonological poles of a symbol. This mapping can vary in distance from one of identity or self-symbolization, in which the thing represents itself, to one of iconicity, in which the semantic and phonological poles reside in roughly the same conceptual space.
Keywords: cognitive linguistics, semantics, syntax, cognitivist framework, iconicity, sign language
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