Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language

The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language offers a comprehensive guide to the role that iconicity - resemblance between form and meaning - plays in all modes of languages, on all levels of language, and in all aspects of language. The originally semiotic notion of iconicity has gained widespread attention beyond the field of linguistics; this volume thus brings together research exploring a wide range of topics in iconicity from different perspectives. It explores the history of iconicity and its place in linguistic theory, in particular how the idea of iconicity has developed over time and how it has recently begun to once again influence thinking and theorizing about language. By presenting a very broad spectrum of iconicity, the chapters provide greater recognition of its influence and present a clearer picture of its scope across the languages of the world. They also offer a critical discussion of the notion of iconicity, as its parameters, dimensions, and operationalizations are not always easy to define. The volume will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions, but also to a wider audience outside linguistics proper, including researchers and students in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Olga Fischer is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (OUP 2007), co-author of A Brief History of English Syntax (CUP 2017), founder and co-editor of the Iconicity in Language and Literature series (Benjamins 1999-present), and chief editor of Folia Linguistica (2016-2023). She has edited volumes on grammaticalization and syntactic change (Benjamins 2000, 2004), and has published widely in these areas in academic journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Diachronica, Transactions of the Philological Society, and Studies in Language. Kimi Akita is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Nagoya University. His research interests include ideophones, sound symbolism, and linguistic typology. He has published in major journals, including Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Journal of Linguistics. He is the co-editor of Iconicity: East Meets West (Benjamins 2015), The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition, and Translation (Routledge 2017), and Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives (Benjamins 2019). Pamela Perniss is Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Chair of the Sign Language Interpreting (DGS-German) program at the University of Cologne. Her research takes a multimodal approach to language and focuses in particular on the role of iconicity in the visual modality in shaping language structure and processing. She has co-edited volumes and special issues related to the study of iconicity, including in the series Iconicity in Language and Literature (Benjamins 2020) and in Language and Cognition (CUP 2020). She is General Editor of Sign Language & Linguistics and Associate Editor of Cognitive Science.