Michelucci Pascal, Fischer Olga, Ljungberg Christina (Editors). Semblance and Signification

John Benjamins, 2011. — xii, 427 pages. (Iconicity in Language and Literature). — ISBN: 978-90-272-4346-1; ISBN: 978-90-272-8482-2.Cognitive poeticians and cognitive linguists have observed that linguistic expression makes use, to varying degrees but at times with striking effects, of special and creative applications of otherwise automatic cognitive structures and processes. Their collective approach to the use of aesthetic and expressive dimensions of language is in fact one that is more economical than positing a separate and independent aesthetic cognitive module or capacity such as inspiration or taste, the semiotic basis for which is fuzzy at best. Iconicity, as a semiotically rich field, enjoys pride of place for the developing understanding of the mental basis for such creative uses of languages. Nowhere is the remotivation and overdetermination of natural signs more resourcefully exploited than in literary, and generally artistic, contexts. Structures are put into unforeseen new uses, layered patterns of signification emerge in the dynamic integration of complementary modes, such as in ecphrasis or multimedia performance. Prevalent and extensive types of linguistic signs make use of reduplication, structural resemblances, ordering, mappings, (re)categorization. A cognitively inspired approach to iconicity therefore offers a unique vantage point from which to consider and reframe the notion of literariness and linguistic creativity thanks to a strongly grounded semiotic perspective. Thus the embodied properties of cognition, the semiotic affordances of linguistic and artistic signs, the view in favour of “nature harnessing” proposed by Mark Changizi (this volume), metaphorical and analogical reasoning, among many other concerns, echo through this volume with obvious prominence end recurrence.The essays in this volume form a careful selection of papers, most relevant for this series, given at the Seventh International Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, hosted by Victoria University in the University of Toronto (Canada) and held on the Victoria College campus. It took place 9–13 June, 2009, during which forty papers were presented on a wide range of topics involving the notion of iconicity in linguistics (phonology, morphology, and syntax), literary works, media studies, cinema, music, painting and architecture as well as featuring a workshop on Cognitive Poetics. The participants represented twenty different nations, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, and The United States.Word forms, word formation, and meaning
Toward a phonosemantic definition of iconic words
Iconic thinking and the contact-induced transfer of linguistic material: The case of Japanese, signed Japanese, and Japan sign language
Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and iconicity in Siwu
Cognitive iconic grounding of reduplication in language
Imagic iconicity in the Chinese language
Words in the mirror: Analysing the sensorimotor interface between phonetics and semantics in Italian
General theoretical approaches
Un mélange genevois: Tacit notions of iconicity in Ferdinand De Saussure’s Writings in General Linguistics
How to put art and brain together
Image, diagram, and metaphor: Unmined resource and unresolved questions
Narrative grammatical structures
The farmers sowed seeds and hopes: Element order in metaphorical phrases
Non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts
A burning world of war: How iconicity works in constructing the fictional world view in A Farewell to Arms
Cognitive poetics
Aesthetic qualities as structural resemblance: Divergence and perceptual forces in poetry
Mental space mapping in classical Chinese poetry: A cognitive approach
Iconicity in conceptual blending: Material anchors in William Morris’s News from Nowhere
Acoustic and visual iconicity
Thematized iconicity and iconic devices in the modern novel: Some modes of interaction
Iconicity and intermediality in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy
Words, like shells, are signs as well as things
Unveiling creative subplots through the non-traditional application of diagrammatic iconicity: An analysis of Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man
[b]Intermedial iconicity
The iconic indexicality of photography
Unbinding the text: Intermedial iconicity in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books
Argumentative, iconic, and indexical structures in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin
John Irving’s A Widow for One Year and Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor as ‘(mult-)i-conic’ works of art