![]() A hearing Ngaanyatjarra speaker using mara yurriku (‘sign language’ or ‘signing’, lit. For example, a hearing Siwu speaker produces the spoken ideophone shû shû while moving his hands upwards quickly to show that flames will flare upwards quickly after he sets two piles of gunpowder on fire ( Dingemanse, 2013: 158). We do not have to look far to find people making use of iconicity during their everyday interactions. Iconicity is generally defined as ‘fundamentally about resemblance’, whereby ‘just like paintings can resemble what they depict, so linguistic signs can look and sound like what they mean in various ways and to varying degrees’ ( Dingemanse et al., 2020: 2). We discuss some implications for the language and communication sciences and explain how this approach may inform a theory of biosemiotics. This builds on our earlier proposal for analysing how different methods of semiotic signalling are combined in multimodal language use. Here, we draw on semiotic approaches to language and communication, including the model of language as signalled via describing, indicating and/or depicting and the notion of non-referential indexicality, to illustrate the multidimensionality of iconicity in co-present interactions. The paradigm of iconicity as a single property is too broad and coarse for comparative semiotics, as important details necessary for understanding the range of human communicative potentialities may be masked. Furthermore, each may co-occur with other semiotics articulated with the face, hands, and body within composite utterances. Yet spoken ideophones may signal depictive and descriptive qualities via speech, while manual actions may signal depictive, descriptive, and indexical qualities via the shape, movement, and placement of the hands in space. For example, tokens of spoken ideophones and manual depicting actions may both be analysed as iconic forms. However, when it comes to analysing and comparing iconicity across different interactions (e.g., deaf, deafblind, hearing) and modes of communication (e.g., manual signs, speech, writing), it is not always clear we are looking at the same thing. Investigations of iconicity in language, whereby interactants coordinate meaningful bodily actions to create resemblances, are prevalent across the human communication sciences.
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