Iconicity in Language: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary

Product Description In linguistics, as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity between the form of a linguistic sign and its meaning. This book covers all aspects of linguistic iconicity in both spoken and signed languages, including definitions of all the relevant concepts and explanations of significant iconic words and expressions, and brief summaries of the contents and main proposals of 30 significant works in the history of iconicity research. It also provides definitions and exemplifications of the principles governing linguistic iconicity and brief overviews of iconic words and expressions in 11 language families and in more than 50 spoken and signed languages all over the world. The book contains 678 entries and more than 8,500 examples drawn from 400 languages, and will appeal to scholars and students interested in general linguistics, the history of linguistics, language typology, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and semiotics. About the Author Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera is Professor of General Linguistics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. He has published 150 papers and 23 books on general linguistics, semantics, syntactic typology, languages of the world, multilingualism, and language policies. He is the author of Continuity and Change: On the Iconicity of Ablaut Reduplication (AR) in Dimensions of Iconicity (2017) and From Agglutination to Polysynthesis: Towards a Biological Characterization of the Spoken Word in To be or not to be a Word. New Reflections on the Definition of Word (2014), and is the co-author of On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language (2014).