Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only.

Not for reproduction or distribution or commercial use

This article was originally published in the Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics,
Second Edition, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier
for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for non-
commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in
instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and
providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.

All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial
reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your
personal or institution’s website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions,
permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's permissions site at:

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial

Nänny M and Fischer O (2006), Iconicity: Literary Texts. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-
in-Chief) Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 5, pp.
462-472. Oxford: Elsevier.
462 Iconicity: Literary Texts
Iconicity: Literary Texts
M Nänny, University of Zurich, Zurich,
Switzerland
O Fischer, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Definition
In a general sense, semiotic iconicity may be defined
as form miming form as when pictures or photo-
graphs reflect an object in the real world. In a lan-
guage context, a ‘sign’ (which may be a word or an
assemblage of words) is said to mime the object or
thought that the sign refers to when something in the
sign (be it oral/aural or visual) reflects something in
the object that is signified by it (its ‘referent’). More
generally, it can then be said that the sign mimes its
meaning. The term ‘iconicity’ goes back to Morris
who introduced it in his Signs, language, and behav-
ior in 1946. Traditionally, the iconic sign has been
divided into three hypo-icons, namely image, dia-
gram and metaphor. Although all three hypo-icons
play a significant role in natural as well as literary
rs
language, metaphor has been much more extensively
discussed and mainly outside the context of iconicity
(see Metaphor: Stylistic Approaches). Metaphor is
Pe
also different from the other two hypo-icons in that
there is no ‘direct’ iconic relation between the sign
and its referent. Instead, it is based on a proportional
analogy, whereby an existing sign x is extended to
's
include a new, metaphorical referent because of a
semantic analogy between the original referent a
or
and the new one b. In other words, there is no direct
relation between the level of form and referent, nei-
ther an ‘imagic’ one nor a ‘diagrammatic’ one. The
th
differences can be represented as follows, in which l
indicates an iconic relation, and = a symbolic one:
Au
image diagram metaphor
sign mapping of signs sign x ! sign x
l l = =
referent mapping of referents referent a $ referent b
This definition of iconicity is a strictly semiotic one.
Nöth (2001) further differentiates between exophoric
and endophoric iconicity (sometimes also called first-
and second-degree iconicity). Whereas exophoric ico-
nicity consists primarily in form miming an object or
thought as we perceive it in the world, endophoric
iconicity refers to a sign miming another sign (thus
being purely intralinguistic); involving, in other
words, the repetition of a sign. Even though endopho-
ric iconicity is concerned with resemblances between
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
signs, and not between the sign and the referent, such
a repetition is only considered of literary interest
when used with effect, i.e., when it adds extra mean-
ing to the text.
Next to the icon, there are two other types of signs,
the index and the symbol. The index is, like the icon,
motivated, but not by resemblance to its referent but by
relations of contiguity or causation. The symbol is a
conventional sign, and its relation to the referent
is arbitrary. It has to be noted that these three categories
are not sharply delineated, symbols often develop out of
motivated signs, and many icons also have an indexical
relation with their referent (cf. White, 1999).
y
op
Image versus Diagram
‘Images’ or ‘imagic icons,’ that is, signs whose form is
related to the referent by means of a ‘natural’ similar-
C
ity, are often said to be exceptional in (spoken) lan-
guage and restricted to a category of acoustically
imitative words labeled ‘onomatopoeic,’ e.g.,
al
‘meow,’ ‘cuckoo.’ (In visual language, i.e., in written
onand especially in signed language, the ‘image’ plays a
larger role.) For this reason, structuralist and formal-
ist linguists since de Saussure have underestimated the
importance of iconicity in language. However, as
most notably R. Jakobson (1971) kept pointing out,
things begin to look different when C. S. Peirce’s
crucial distinction between the ‘image’ and the ‘dia-
gram’ is adopted. In Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, an
iconic image is a single sign that resembles its referent
with respect to some visual or aural characteristic. An
iconic diagram, however, is an arrangement of signs,
none of which necessarily resembles its referent but
whose relationships to each other mirror the relation-
ships of their referents. Thus, in Caesar’s famous
phrase ‘veni, vidi, vici,’ the sequence of individually
symbolic words presents an iconic diagram of the
sequence of actions it enumerates.
Although conceding the arbitrary or ‘symbolic’ na-
ture of the individual linguistic sign in isolation, a
number of linguists in Jakobson’s wake have em-
phatically drawn attention to the near universality
of diagrammatic iconicity in the grammars of vari-
ous languages, expressing not only chronological
sequence, but also centrality versus peripherality,
distance versus proximity, symmetry, quantification,
etc. It is in the nature of literature to exploit all
linguistic forms and, hence, also all iconic possibilities
for aesthetic purposes.
History of Iconic Criticism of Literature
Whereas the study of iconicity in everyday language
has become an accepted part of modern linguistics,

this is less the case with the literary uses of it. Because
of an uninformed reduction of the notion of iconicity
to that of imagic signs only, a restricted field of inves-
tigation offered itself to literary criticism along iconic
lines. Thus, traditionally, the main objects of iconic
investigations by literary scholars have been the liter-
ary use of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism, on
the one hand, and of typography in pattern poetry
and modern visual poetry, on the other. The presence
of iconic diagrams in literary texts has been largely
ignored. These mainly occur on the level of morpho-
syntax and discourse, although they also may be pres-
ent on the phonemic and typographic level. Once
we have recognized the diagram as an iconic sign,
too, the presence of iconicity in literature becomes
pervasive.
A large number of iconic studies of literature
formed an integral part of books on stylistics. Already
Spitzer had discussed iconic aspects in some of
his stylistic studies, notably in Linguistics and literary
history (1948), as did Davie (1955), Ullmann (1964),
Hollander (1975), Epstein (1975), and Leech and
Short (1981). Wimsatt (1976) made a strong plea
for more research along iconic lines. Nänny (1986)
offered an early survey of iconic aspects of literary
texts. Attridge (1982: 287–295) studied iconic func-
tions of poetic rhythms; Cureton (1980, 1986) ana-
rs
lyzed the poetry of e. e. cummings from an iconic
point of view. Anderson (1998) has presented the
Pe
most comprehensive survey of iconic features in liter-
ary texts so far. Important recent studies of iconicity
in literature can be found in the publications that
have resulted from the international conferences on
's
‘Iconicity in language and literature’ (see the series
edited by Nänny and Fischer, 1999; Fischer and
or
Nänny, 2001; Müller and Fischer, 2003; Maeder
et al., 2005); evidence for this entry is partly based
on the articles collected there.
th
Interpretation
Au
Especially in literature, language has a surplus of
meaning and works ‘‘at full stretch’’ (Nowottny,
1962: 85) by being ‘hypersemanticized’ (Cureton,
1980: 319) and consisting in a mixture of ‘digital’
and ‘analogical’ coding (Bernhart, 1977: 87); there-
fore, the perception of iconic features depends on
the reader’s awareness and readiness to recognize, so
to speak, the analogical structure behind the digital
surface form. As with metaphor, the awareness of
iconicity is dependent on the recognition of similarity.
Although texts have a range of potential iconicity, this
is merely latent. As Givón (1985: 190) writes, ‘‘the
notion of ‘similarity’ between two entities requires
the consciousness of similarity on the part of some
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Iconicity: Literary Texts 463
cognizing mind.’’ Hence, iconicity, like beauty, is in
the eye of the beholder: the perception of imitative
form depends on the reader’s capacity to see connec-
tions, to perceive similarities between the meaning of
a sign or text and the formal means used for its
expression.
However, not all iconicity is of the same degree.
Icons may be divided into ‘transparent’ and ‘translu-
cent’ ones (Pateman, 1986). That is, transparent icons
are immediately recognizable (these often concern
‘images’), whereas translucent ones (usually the more
abstract diagrams) need a more careful scrutiny and
some imagination. Thus, the transparent icon may be
compared to an (explicit) simile, whereas the translu-
y
cent icon is more like an (implicit) metaphor. In both
op
cases, the reader or hearer is helped by the fact
that iconicity is ‘foregrounded.’ As Haiman writes
(see Iconicity): ‘‘The fundamental iconic nature of
C
markedness is a virtual cliché: marked form corre-
sponds to marked meaning.’’
The question of whether an iconic feature, be it
al
imagic or diagrammatic, is the result of chance or of
on the poet’s design has little relevance. What is impor-
tant is that a similarity between form and meaning
may be perceived intersubjectively. It is important to
recognize that iconicity in literature is in the main
semantically motivated. The semantic content of the
verbal unit or its context has to activate and focus the
normally latent mimetic potential. So most iconic
interpretation moves from meaning to its formal
miming (with the possible exception of ‘phonetic
metaphors’ discussed later), although it is, of course,
the form that provides the impetus. What is generally
true of any sign is also true of the icon: the meaning
of a sign is not fully contained within it but arises
only in its interpretation. In short, an iconic dimen-
sion will only appear if the meaning of the textual
passage is compatible with it. Because the recognition
of iconicity is via the mind of the hearer/reader, it also
must be clear that the categories of image and dia-
gram are not always clear-cut. Although the imagic
icon seems closer to ‘reality,’ it is still always an
abstraction of it. In the diagrammatic icon, the simi-
larity is only in the mapping, the signs themselves no
longer reflect any actual features of the referents.
Iconicity in Poetry, Prose, Drama
It may be said that in terms of literary genres the pre-
sence of iconicity is highest in poetry, for poetry
allows the most complex and innovative use of lan-
guage in terms of sound and space (typography). Ac-
cording to one important literary tradition even, the
Mallarmé-Valéry version of what Roland Barthes
called ‘Cratylism,’ the mimetic or iconic virtue of
464 Iconicity: Literary Texts
language is an especial privilege of poetry: it consti-
tutes the poetic function proper and is seen as a
compensation for and defiance of the arbitrariness
of the sign. Prose, however, whether descriptive or
narrative, offers a wide potential of iconic significa-
tion too. Literary works whose narrative is organized
by means of the spatial order of a journey or the
temporal sequence of a chronology are sequential
diagrammatic icons of a comprehensive kind.
Drama, being a literary genre that directly mirrors
meaning by visible and audible action, gestures, cos-
tumes and stage-scenery provides fewer opportunities
for the application of verbal iconic functions. Its rela-
tive lack of iconicity can perhaps also be explained by
the fact that there is not enough time for the audience
to grasp its effect; this is particularly true of diagram-
matic icons. However, it is well known that, for in-
stance, Shakespeare’s plays are heavily iconic.
Imagic Iconicity
al
The Sound Level
The use of onomatopoeia (i.e., acoustic iconicity)
and sound symbolism in literary texts, especially
on
poetry, is widespread and common. A famous, often
quoted example can be found in Lord Tennyson’s
rs
The princess (vii, 202–203):
The moan of doves in immemorial elms
Pe
And murmuring of innumerable bees
The repetition of the nasals /m/ and /n/ in these two
lines (12 occurrences!) suggests the continuously
humming sound of ‘‘innumerable bees.’’ All the
's
words of the excerpt are, semiotically speaking, sym-
bols by definition, except possibly ‘murmur.’ But
or
most of them share the hypo-iconic quality of the
onomatopoeic image. Thus, J. C. Ransom’s famous
th
parodic rendering of the second line as ‘‘the murder-
ing of innumerable beeves’’ is beside the point because
in this version there is no longer any miming of
Au
meaning: beeves do not hum.
Another interesting passage occurs in William
Wordsworth’s ‘An evening walk’ (ll. 143–150):
How busy the enormous hive within,
While Echo dallies with the various din
Some, hardly heard their chissel’s clinking sound,
Toil, small as pigmies, in the gulph profound;
Some, dim between th’aereal cliffs descryed,
O’erwalk the viewless plank from side to side;
These by the pale-blue rocks that ceaseless ring
Glad from their airy baskets hang and sing.
Throughout this excerpt the high, bright, tense,
and continuous sounds (given in bold) made by
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
the clinking chisels in a Welsh slate quarry are
onomatopoeically rendered by means of a repetition
of the relatively high vowels /I/ and /i/ and the fortis
plosives /t/, /p/, and /k/, in combination with sharp
voiceless fricatives: /s/, /y/, /f/, and ‘singing’ nasal and
liquid continuants such as, /n/, /m/, /N/, /r/, and /l/.
Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are not sepa-
rate phenomena but, rather, form a continuum. Ono-
matopoeia usually refers to complete acoustic signs,
whereas the term sound symbolism is often preserved
for phonaesthemes, i.e., iconic phonemes or phoneme
clusters within the word. The above examples are
closer to sound symbolism. A good example of a
purer use of onomatopoeia is Eve Merriam’s poem
y
‘Weather.’ Both onomatopoeia and sound symbolism
op
are affected by the limitations of the phonological
system of each individual language, but, in addition,
sound symbolism is also influenced by language con-
C
ventions (many phonaesthemes may be the product of
endophoric rather than exophoric icons, cf. A. Fischer,
1999) and by social and cultural attitudes within a
speech community. (For a list of sound symbolic
icons. An interesting reference to the literary-critical
use of sound symbolism is found in a passage from
Alexander Pope’s An essay on criticism (ll. 365–371),
whose famous first line explicitly postulates an iconic
connection between sound and meaning, which it
exemplifies in the succeeding lines:
The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some Rock’s vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow.
Thus, in the first three lines the heavy accumulation
of fricatives and nasals/liquids reinforces the idea of
soft breezes and murmuring streams and echoes
the idea of smoothness. Sound symbolism may also
work syllabically or across the word, as is clear from
the last two lines in the extract from Pope, where
Ajax’s labor is described in monosyllabic words
with awkward consonant clusters either as part of
the word (‘Ajax,’ ‘strive,’ ‘throw’), or across the
word (Ajax-str, rock’s-v, vast-w, words-m).
The Visual Level
Alphabetic letters whose outlines mirror the contours
of objects represent iconic images in the normal, visu-
al understanding of the word ‘image.’ Examples of
such letter-icons can be found in Shakespeare’s refer-
ence to the circular Globe Theatre by the letter-
metaphor ‘‘this wooden O’’ (Henry V, ‘Prologue,’

l. 13) or in John Donne’s use of the uppercase letter ‘A’
as an icon of what a pair of contemporary compasses
looked like in ‘‘A valediction: forbidding mourning’’
(ll. 25–26): ‘‘If they be two, they are two so/As stiff
twin compasses are two.’’ In Absalom and Achitophel
(Part II, ll. 457–463) John Dryden uses the capital
letter ‘O’ as a translucent icon for the corpulence of
the Irish poet Thomas Shadwell, whom he gives the
round biblical name ‘Og.’ A large number of letter-
icons is also found in concrete poetry and particularly
in the poetry of e. e. cummings, who uses the letters
‘O’/’o’ for the moon in his ‘mOOn Over tOwns
mOOn’ (CP 383) or for a pair of eyes in ‘‘l oo k-’’ (‘i
will be,’ CP 195).
Visual outlines of objects have often been created
by the typography of pattern poems in order to sug-
gest an iconic image of the object the text refers
to (wing, flask, cross). The tradition of shaped
poems goes back to the ancient Greeks and has
had revivals in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, 17th
and 20th century. George Herbert’s poem ‘The altar,’
al
whose boundary evokes a classical altar, and his
‘Easter wings’ offer famous typographic icons. In
modern times, a number of visual or concrete poems
on
have iconic contours of objects: poets such as Apolli-
naire, the futurists (e.g., Marinetti), J. Hollander,
E. Morgan, and many others have written shape
rs
poems.
Typographic iconicity may also be conveyed by
Pe
absence rather than presence. Wolf (2005) shows
how blanks can be used to suggest silence, as in
this short poem ‘Schweigen’ (‘Silence’) by Eugen
Gomringer:
's
schweigen schweigen schweigen
schweigen schweigen schweigen
or
schweigen schweigen
schweigen schweigen schweigen
th
schweigen schweigen schweigen
Another example of a meaningful blank or white line
Au
may be found in Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Our lives
are Swiss,’ in which the blank line between the two
stanzas suggests the white ‘‘solemn alps’’ between
Switzerland and Italy.
Diagrammatic Iconicity
The Sound Level
Among the most frequent iconic diagrams used in
poetry are rhythm and meter. As is all too familiar,
poets have reinforced meaning through sound by
controlling the speed and movement of their lines.
They do this not only by their selection and arrange-
ment of vowels and consonants, their disposition of
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Iconicity: Literary Texts 465
pauses, but also by their choice and use of meter and
rhythm. This enables poets to express feelings iconi-
cally (such as mourning and joy) but also slow and
fast movements generally, for instance, galloping in
Tennyson’s ‘The charge of the light brigade.’ Conven-
tional poetic metrics may be put in the service of
iconicity as well. A somewhat unusual iconic use of
the metrical mould of the heroic couplet can be found
in Dryden’s ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham,’ ll. 3–4:
For sure our Souls were near ally’d; and thine
Cast in the same Poetick mould with mine.
The ‘Souls’ of the deceased young poet Oldham and
of the older poet Dryden are actually and formally
y
combined in the mould of the same couplet here
op
(additionally foregrounded by the fact that ‘mine’
and ‘thine’ rhyme). But in order to emphasize his
view that Oldham was a rougher poet, Dryden
makes the second line, representing Oldham’s line
C
(‘thine/Cast’), somewhat irregular (by means of a
trochaic beginning) and less mellifluous (because of
five voiceless plosives: Cast, poetick).
The repetition of sounds by means of assonance,
rhyme, and alliteration may serve diagrammatic pur-
poses. In the passage from Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening
Walk’ quoted earlier, the echoing of sounds, ‘‘Echo
dallies with the various din,’’ made by the clinking
chisels is diagrammatically rendered by means of the
repetition of the sharp and brief /I/ sounds. Quite
generally, echoes are often diagrammatically mimed
by a repetition of sounds and words. This is done, for
instance, in Wordsworth’s lines from ‘‘‘Yes! It was the
mountain Echo’’’ (ll. 1–4):
YES, it was the mountain Echo,
Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to the shouting Cuckoo,
Giving to her sound for sound!
In general, sound repetition foregrounds the pho-
netic link between two signs thereby foregrounding
also a semantic link. The link only works when it is
marked; in other words, in poems in which the use of
rhyme or alliteration is conventional or follows a
conventional scheme, the devices in question do not
normally serve an iconic function (cf. Hollander,
1975: 121). Although rhyme usually works on the
phonetic level, it has to be noted that rhyme may
also work typographically, when poets make use of
‘eye-rhymes.’
Most rhymes are based on a combination of pho-
nic similarity or identity and semantic difference.
As the poetic (nonconventional) device of rhyme
links words in a nonsyntactic way, it may produce
new semantic equations and correlations. Perfect
466 Iconicity: Literary Texts
single rhymes, for instance, may be icons of resem-
blance or unity (cf. the ‘thine/mine’ rhyme in the
couplet from Dryden, discussed earlier), whereas
the dissonance of imperfect single rhymes may
diagrammatically express disorder, dissimilarity,
inaccuracy or even negation, but also doubt and un-
certainty. For instance, in ‘The first book of Statius his
Thebais’ (ll. 115–117), Pope makes use of an off-
rhyme (‘bear’/’prepare’ – ’War’) to suggest discord
(‘mutual Hate and War’):
Go, and a Parent’s heavy Curses bear;
Break all the Bonds of Nature, and prepare
Their kindred Souls to mutual Hate and War.
The off-rhyme also ‘‘Breaks the Bonds’’ of the per-
vasive pattern of the dominant heroic couplet. In
Shakespeare’s Pericles, (I.i.45–46),
For death remembered should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust is error.
The off-rhyme ‘mirror/error’ emphasizes the semantic
‘error’ by phonetic means.
al
Rhyme may also serve as a phonetic metaphor link-
ing one sign to another sign, which is left unexpressed
and is semantically unrelated, purely by its sound, and
on
thus forcing a new connotation on the sign or creating
irony through distance. Peter Howard made use of
rs
this to great effect in his poem ‘A poppy,’ in which
he subliminally links words for flowers (‘carnation,’
Pe
‘violets,’ ‘samphire’) with words related to ‘war’
(carnage, violence, gunfire), ending the poem with
generals who were awarded ‘petals.’ The whole
poem, which can only really be appreciated two-
dimensionally, is an assemblage of iconic means in its
's
use of colors, fonts, and (temporal) spacing.
or
Variations in rhyme schemes also may assume vari-
ous iconic tasks such as indicating change and frag-
mentation. Symmetrical schemes may serve as iconic
th
diagrams of an embrace, a frame or imprisonment,
whereas a disruption of the rhyme scheme by non-
Au
rhymes may suggest the idea of uniqueness or solitar-
iness. The three rhymes that characterize a triplet
may diagrammatically suggest the number three
(as in Dryden’s ‘To the pious memory of Mrs Anne
Killigrew’ [ll. 41–43]), but also circularity, centering,
extension, excess, and continuity. In Donne’s poem
‘Woman’s constancy’ (from Songs and sonnets, ll.
5–11), the disruption of the rhyme scheme iconically
reinforces the (hypothetical) change in the relation-
ship between the speaker and his lover. In Shelley’s
sonnet ‘Ozymandias,’ the idea of fragmentation is
suggested by a broken rhyme scheme. In a passage
from ‘The arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca’ (ll. 53–55),
Pope diagrammatically uses the off-rhyme of the
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
third line of a triplet (which also breaks the scheme
of rhyming couplets) to express ‘solitary’-ness:
Mean while Ulysses in his Country lay,
Releas’d from Sleep; and round him might survey
The solitary Shore, and rowling Sea.
The Visual Level
Ever since poetry was produced as printed text, poets
have made use of the possibilities that print offered,
such as differences in font, size of letters, spacing,
color, special punctuation, etc. A prominent and use-
ful iconic tool in the hands of poets is the manipula-
tion of lineation. As with rhyme, both single lines but
y
also variations in conventional lineation schemes may
op
be used with iconic effect, suggesting size, distance,
change etc. In his ‘erosive poem’ ‘Archives,’ Edwin
Morgan presents an iconic diagram of historical at-
C
trition by the gradual fading out of lines until they
become illegible. In e. e. cummings’s poem ‘l(a’ (from
95 poems), the lean shape of this text (most lines
consist of one or two letters) suggests the outline of
the number 1, the (al)oneness of the speaker as well as
the pattern made by the solitary falling leaf.
Gradually, longer lines may offer a perfect diagram-
matic icon of increase or growth as, for example, in
Dryden’s satirical characterization of Sir Fopling in his
‘Epilogue to The man of mode’ (ll. 19–22):
His bulky folly gathers as it goes,
And, rolling o’er you, like a Snow-ball growes.
His various modes from various Fathers follow,
One taught the Toss, and one the new French Wallow.
Increasing line-length mirrors the snow-balling of
Sir Fopling’s ‘‘bulky folly,’’ steadily gathering weight,
whereas the sixteen ‘o/O’s’ of the passage present
iconic images of a ‘‘rolling . . . Snow-ball’’ bowling
down the four lines. By contrast, gradually shorter
lines may function as iconic diagrams of decrease
and decline. In the Prelude (Bk. III, ll. 10–12),
Wordsworth uses line-shortening to indicate the
sucking or contracting force of an eddy:
The place, as we approached, seemed more and more
To have an eddy’s force, and sucked us in
More eagerly at every step we took.
A well-known classic example of the use of the
downward sequence of lines on the page as an icon
of falling, is Milton’s description of the fall of Satan in
Book I of Paradise lost (ll. 740–746). By strategically
placing line breaks, Milton uses a kind of imitative
form for Satan’s fall. Increasing and decreasing
line length may also be combined: in T. S. Eliot’s
‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ the steady

growth in lines 45–48, followed by diminishing lines
in the next stanza, iconically shows the way in which
the life and decisions of the speaker’s younger days
‘reverse’ (l. 58) now that he is experienced and
coming nearer his life’s end.
The overall lineation of a poem may also func-
tion as a diagrammatic icon of a speaker’s condi-
tion. Robert Herrick’s ‘A Bacchanalian Verse’ (first
stanza):
DRinke up
Your Cup,
But not spill Wine;
For if you
Do,
‘Tis an ill signe;
expresses a state of drunkenness by the irregular-
ity and staccato of lineation, reinforced by strong
enjambment.
The relative (visual) length or shortness of a single
line may diagrammatically reflect the semantic con-
tent of the line. A classic example is found in Pope’s
al
An essay on criticism (ll. 355–356), in which the
second verse of the couplet mirrors the ‘‘slow length’’
of a snake iconically by an alexandrine whose extra
on quentative sound or activity (as in ‘murmur,’ used in
foot prolongs the line:
rs
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.
The remarkable length of the first line of Dickinson’s
Pe
poem 764 metaphorically refers to the premonitory
long shadow cast by the setting sun:
Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn –
's
Indicative that Suns go down –
An example of a short line expressing diminution or
or
absence can be found in Pope’s ‘Moral essays: epistle
III. to Allen Lord Bathurst’ (ll. 281–282):
th
Blush, Grandeur, blush! proud Courts, withdraw your
blaze!
Au
Ye little Stars! hide your diminished rays.
The ‘blaze’ of ‘Grandeur’ and ‘proud Courts’ is set off
in a prominently long line against the weakly shining
‘little Stars’ with their ‘diminished rays.’
The manipulation of line breaks or line endings,
whether end-stopped or run-on lines (enjambments),
is an important part of the poet’s craft. Inevitably,
it often assumes iconic force too. In Ted Hughes’s
‘Second glance at a jaguar’ (ll. 16–17), the jaguar’s
walking back and forth and turning corners all the
time is iconically rendered by the way the pertinent
descriptive line in his poem breaks:
At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it . . .
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Iconicity: Literary Texts 467
The line-break immediately after ‘‘turn a corner’’
reinforces the jaguar’s turning ‘‘in himself.’’
Poets have also made frequent iconic use of the
stanza-break in order to mark hollowness or open-
ness but also a barrier or separation. In his ‘Lines on a
young lady’s photograph album’ (The less deceived,
ll. 13–14), Philip Larkin makes an impressive iconic
use of this between stanzas 7 and 8:
We know what was
Won’t call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across
The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
y
op
The Structural Level: Morphology
Morphological iconicity based on word structure ap-
pears often in natural language and is also frequent in
C
literary texts. Reduplication, or the consecutive repe-
tition of a morpheme, bound or free, is used in both
(and indeed very common in relatively ‘new’ lan-
guages such as Pidgins and Creoles, cf. Kouwenberg,
2003) to indicate the repetition of an action, a fre-
Tennyson’s line earlier), plurality, intensity or conti-
nuity. James Joyce relies on it frequently in both
Ulysses and Finnegans wake, as in the line, ‘‘[h]ugger-
mugger in corners. Slop about in slipper-slappers
for fear he’d wake’’ (Ulysses, The ‘Hades’ episode),
in which reduplication is used (together with ablaut)
as a frequentative and intensifier. Another device
resorted to by Joyce is the blending of two free
morphemes into one word in order to suggest simul-
taneity or ‘oneness’; thus, in the same chapter, we find
new lexicalizations such as ‘‘silkhatted head,’’ ‘‘nose
whiteflattened,’’ ‘‘craped knocker’’ (i.e., a knocker
‘‘draped with crape’’).
Partial repetition occurs in paronomasia, which
involves a similarity in sound between etymologically
unconnected words whereby the formal correspon-
dence suggests a semantic connection, as in this
line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (III.iv.8):
‘‘These times of woe afford no times to woo’’ (italics
added). A similar example can be found in Donne’s
Devotions (from the ‘Seventeenth meditation’):
where the phrase ‘‘for whom the bell tols’’/ ‘‘it tols
for him/mee/thee’’ occurs repeatedly, but is trans-
formed at one point into ‘‘this bell that tels mee,’’
showing both the urgency of its ‘tolling’ and what it
has to ‘tell’ us. In most cases, as here, the paronoma-
sia is foregrounded by further repetition of words or
of structure. In like manner, the repetition of words
by varying their inflexional morphemes (polyptoton)
or derivational ones (paronymy) may serve iconic
468 Iconicity: Literary Texts
ends. The line from Richard II (V.v.49), ‘‘I wasted
time, and now doth time waste me,’’ emphasizes, by
the use of the past and present forms of the same verb,
Richard’s own earlier responsibility for his present
state. Donne, in the ‘Meditation’ quoted earlier, uses
the words ‘translated,’ ‘translators’ and ‘translation’
all within the same sentence in order to emphasize the
constant ‘translation’ (i.e., ‘transferal’) of one action
onto the next.
In general, the repetition of a word is one of the
basic tools of the rhetorician’s trade. Thus, the itera-
tion of adverbs such as ‘again’ or ‘oft(en)’ performa-
tively reinforces their meaning. This is done, for
instance, at the beginning of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern
Abbey’ (ll. 1–15) where ‘again’ is repeated four times,
or in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at midnight’ (ll. 23–26) where
‘oft’ is repeated three times. A similar iconic effect is
achieved in Wordsworth’s ‘echoes loud / Redoubled
and redoubled’ (from ‘There was a boy,’ ll. 14–15),
with the repetition enacting the echo. G. M.
Hopkins’s repetition of ‘trod’ in ‘‘Generations have
al
trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with
trade; bleared, smeared with / toil’’ (from ‘God’s
Grandeur,’ ll. 5–6) stresses the monotony of genera-
on
tions of toil, which is further enhanced by the paro-
nomasia in ‘‘bleared, smeared.’’ In Wordsworth’s
‘Elegiac stanzas’ (ll. 5–6), the repetition of words
rs
reinforces the ideas of both continuity and similarity:
‘‘So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! / So like, so very
Pe
like, was day to day.’’
Combined with decreasing length, the iteration of a
word may present an icon of acceleration as in
J. Masters’s Bhowani Junction (chap. 28):
's
Pater [the engine-driver] tugged the whistle-cord again
and [ . . . ]. Whooof! the platform began to slide back.
or
[. . .] Whooof! I saw the Stationmaster writing in a note-
book; whoof – a man could still walk beside the train;
th
whoof – he’d have to run; whoof – run fast; whoof,
whoof, whoof, whoof!
Masters reenacts the acceleration of a departing
Au
steam-engine by means of gradually decreasing
phrases and word-length that he puts between the
repeated acoustic icons ‘whoof.’
In many cases the position of the repeated sign (or
structure) adds to the effect of this iconic device; this,
however, belongs more properly in the next section,
syntax.
The Structural Level: Syntax
The repetition of a word or structure may be more
foregrounded by giving the repeated sign the same
initial or final position (anaphora and epistrophe res-
pectively) or a clearly opposite position (anadiplosis).
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Thus, in Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice
(III.iii.4–5):
I’ll have my bond, speak not against my bond, –
I have sworn an oath, that I will have my bond
The repeated end-position of ‘bond’ emphasizes
Shylock’s fixation on the letter of the bond. In con-
trast, in the medieval poem ‘The pearl,’ the last word
of each stanza is repeated in the first line of the next
stanza: ‘‘To bye hym a perle wat three mascelle three.
// This makele three perle, þat bo three t is dere’’ (ll.
732–733), in order to mime the perfect roundness of
the ‘immaculate pearl.’ Herbert uses a very similar
device in his poem ‘A wreath’ to suggest the way the
y
wreath is woven together. Leech and Short (1981:
op
219) show how Joseph Conrad in his novel The secret
agent, uses a similar ‘chaining’ device to suggest the
halting perception of one of its characters.
Position may also be used without repetition, when
C
the lexical content of the word itself reflects its posi-
tion. Thus, the word ‘end’ is often put at the end of
a line, passage or text. An early example is offered
by Herbert’s poem ‘Paradise,’ which ends on the
capitalized ‘END.’ In Wordsworth’s Prelude (Bk. VI,
ll. 570–572), there is a passage that ends on the word
‘end’ and in which the words ‘first’ and ‘midst’ are
also iconically positioned:
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
By manipulating the sequence of textual elements,
writers may embody meaning in verbal form.
A natural form of iconicity occurs when the signs
are used in such a way that their order reflects the
chronological order of the actions referred to. Poets
also use sequencing to suggest distance or proximity
(both temporal and spatial). They may foreground
proximity by putting two (semantically or syntacti-
cally unrelated) signs next to one another, and dis-
tance by putting semantically or syntactically
connected items at the opposite extremes of a line.
Wordsworth’s poetry offers an example of the latter
in his Prelude (Bk. V, ll. 79–80), where he describes
the dream of an Arab who had
. . . underneath one arm
A stone, and in the opposite hand, a shell.
‘Stone’ and ‘shell,’ are placed at the opposite ends of
the line, reflecting left-hand and right-hand position.
Another way in which syntax may be manipulated is
by the use of ellipsis and structural parallelism. Charles
Dickens uses ellipsis as well as parallel structure (and
lexical repetition) at the beginning of Bleak House,

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows . . .; fog
down the river, where it rolls . . . Fog on the Essex
Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into
. . .; fog lying out on . . .; fog drooping on . . . Fog in the
eyes and throats of . . .; fog in the stem and bowl of . . .
The ellipsis of finite verbal forms in the main clauses,
and the repetition of the same structural patterns
(prepositional phrases, -ing forms, ‘where’-clauses)
present a syntactic icon of London as ‘‘a world of
stasis, devoid of real action’’ (Müller, 1999: 396).
Another example of this can be found in Christina
Rossetti’s ‘Sleeping at last,’ which has not a single
finite verb in the first two stanzas, describing death
(‘‘sleeping at last’’). Syntactic parallelism together
with asyndeton (an abrupt sequence of unconnected
phrases) may be used as an iconic suggestion of simul-
taneity, ‘‘Women shrieked, cattle bellowed, dogs
howled, men ran to and fro . . . ’’ (Sir Walter Scott,
Old mortality, 1893: 185), a device frequently
employed by Dickens, too. Asyndeton is also used to
suggest brief, vehement, jerky movements or inner
agitation. Samuel Richardson makes frequent use of
this to convey extreme emotional states in his novels
Pamela and Clarissa. In contrast, polysyndeton (the
repeated use of a connector), may suggest weariness,
or something long drawn out as in Macbeth’s
(V.v.19–20): ‘‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-
rs
morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.’’
Syntactic subordination may serve as a diagrammatic
Pe
icon of hierarchy, of narrative distinction between
primary, secondary and tertiary matters as, e.g., in
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, where the syntactic
structure is a mise-en-abyme of the structure of the
's
whole novel (cf. Müller, 1999: 402–406).
The degree of transitivity of a construction used
or
may have an effect on the meaning of the text. We
saw above that the absence of finite verbs suggests
stasis. In a similar way the use of intransitive verbs
th
may reflect nonfinality. In Raymond Chandler’s The
little sister, the following description occurs (Penguin
Au
ed., 49): ‘‘I collapsed on the floor. The door opened.
A key rattled. The door closed. The key turned.
Silence.’’ The use of intransitive, or indeed ergative,
verbs gives the atmosphere an air of suspension. No
agent is mentioned, the effect is given but the cause
remains unknown. Transitivity is also connected to
the choice of subject. Animate subjects are highly
transitive, while inanimate subjects distance the read-
er from the text, making him feel less involved. Jane
Austen was fond of using inanimate subjects, which
created the distance necessary for her irony to work.
In chapter 18 of Emma, she describes Mrs. Weston’s
severe disappointment as follows:
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Iconicity: Literary Texts 469
Mrs Weston was exceedingly disappointed – much more
disappointed, in fact, than her husband, though her
dependence on seeing the young man had been so
much more sober: but a sanguine temper, though for
ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always
pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. It
soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope
again. (Italics added)
By using abstract nouns as subjects of verbs, which
normally take animate subjects, we are removed from
sharing the character’s feelings.
A more clearly literary device is the use of chias-
mus. Chiasmus is a verbal figure of repetition whose
second half inverts the order of the elements in the
y
first half: 1–2–3 >< 3–2–1. Obviously, this figure
op
may be used as an iconic diagram for it obeys a
certain relational order or arrangement of its consti-
tuents. But depending on the meaning an author
wants to reinforce, this figure may be interpreted
C
in various ways. To mention just a few, a chiastic
arrangement may be seen as a dynamic, circular se-
al
quence that returns to its beginning (1>2>3:3>2>1)
or as a sequence that inverts its direction (1>
2>3><3<2<1). But the pattern may also be inter-
on
preted as a static arrangement of components expres-
sing symmetry, multiple bracketing or centering
(1[2[3:3]2]1]) of the inner elements by the outer ones.
A simple example of chiasmus is found in Macbeth
(I.i.11): The witches’ ‘‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’’
This mantric phrase may be seen as an emblem, a
mise-en-abyme of the plot of the play that starts out
fair, deals with a lot of foulness and ends fair again.
A chiastic order of letters that iconically reinforce the
idea of enclosure is offered by Coleridge in a passage
from his ‘Frost at midnight’ (ll. 51–52), in which the
speaker remembers his school days and complains
about his prison-like boarding school: ‘‘For I was
reared/In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim.’’
The reversal of the letters in ‘mid’ and ‘dim’ presents
a small-scale enclosure, perfectly framing the
secluded enclosure of the ‘cloisters.’ A chiasmus of
sounds is used by Coleridge in the first line of ‘Kubla
Khan’: ‘‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately plea-
sure-dome decree.’’ The chiastic sequence of the
accented and unaccented vowels, /za: na du: did ku:
bla ka:n/, may be said to allude to the symmetry of the
‘dome.’ The palindrome ‘did’ is the perfect pivot of
the whole scheme.
Chiasmus also may be spread over a larger piece of
text as in Blake’s poem ‘A divine image,’ in which the
‘fearful symmetry’ of the divine form of man is iconi-
cally expressed across the two stanzas showing both a
reversed position of four phrases within the lines as
470 Iconicity: Literary Texts
well as across the lines, making the symmetry even
stronger.
Structural chiasmus, making use of the same lexical
items or letters, forms a transparent icon. Next
to these there are also translucent icons, where the
repeated signs are not in strictly reverse positions or
where they involve synonyms and antonyms rather
than the same sign. In Soldier’s home (second para-
graph), Hemingway uses such a chiasmus as a dia-
grammatic reflection of inversion, centering and
quasi-visual symmetry:
There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with
two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the
corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German
girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the
picture. (Italics added)
By looking only at the italicized items and ignoring the
surrounding words, we can spot the chiasmus, which,
interwoven with the narrative, one would normally
not see. It is interesting to note that ‘Krebs,’ whose
name stands at the fulcrum of the inversion, is the
al
German word for crayfish, an animal that is famous
for inverting its movement by walking forwards and
backwards. This chiasmus functions as a quasi-picto-
on
rial verbal frame for the description of the photo-
graph, as well as an emblem for the reversal of the
rs
soldier’s outlook on life after his experience in the
war. A chiasmus may become even more difficult to
Pe
spot when the repeated elements are no longer lexi-
cally the same, as in Hemingway’s ‘Chapter IV’ from
In our time. To see the chiasmus, we have given the
repeated elements in italics and highlighted the re-
peated synonymous expressions by putting them
's
in bold.
or
It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely
perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply price-
less. A big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a
th
house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it
and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely
Au
topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them
from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out
alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect
obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were fright-
fully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we
had to fall back.
This chiastic order is an icon of a symmetrical oppo-
sition of enemy troops on the two sides of a bridge,
across which the obstacle of a ‘‘big old wrought-iron
grating’’ has been put. The chiastically centralized
‘‘absolutely topping’’ reflects the ‘top’ of the bridge,
the soldiers’ main aim, which both sides in the end do
not reach/hold.
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
The Semantic Level
Since semiotics is concerned with the interpretation of
signs, iconicity as a subfield is intimately connected
with semantics. As was stated previously, a sign func-
tions as an icon only via the perception of a language
user: without interpretation there is no icon. The
examples that have been discussed so far all rely
heavily on form, it is the formal internal structure,
the repetition of forms, or the way forms are ordered
which suggest an iconic interpretation, with the lan-
guage user perceiving some similarity with reality
(exophoric) or between two forms (endophoric).
Some iconic structures rely more heavily on meaning.
y
The prime example is metaphor, which properly
belongs to this section, since the similarity in form
op
only occurs as the result of a perceived similarity in
meaning. Some of the structures discussed earlier also
rely more heavily on semantics, as is the case with
C
chiastic constructions that are not mere formal repe-
titions but involve synonyms and antonyms. It is clear
in such cases that without prior interpretation of
these items there can be no recognition of a particular
structural ordering. The same would be true for a
syntactic parallelism that employs different lexical
items, as in the quotation from Chandler earlier:
‘‘The door opened. A key rattled. The door closed.
The key turned.’’ One needs to know the meaning of
those items in order to see that each sentence involves
a subject and an ergative verb. Also the examples
discussed in the previous section, where signs mean-
ing ‘end’ are placed at the end, are only possible if one
knows the meaning of the sign beforehand; the form
of the sign does not contribute in any way to its
iconicity. It is clear then that knowledge of the mean-
ing of a sign is a vital part of all iconic recognition,
and that in quite a few cases form only marginally
contributes.
The Discourse and Narrative Level
A literary text as a whole also may be an icon of what
it is about. Bolinger (1980: 18) notes a direct relation
between the overall size or intricacy of the linguistic
text and the ideas that the text expresses. To give a
few examples: The highly idiosyncratic form, in terms
of genre and style, of Hopkins’s ‘curtal sonnet’ ‘Pied
beauty’ mirrors the most highly individualized
‘inscape’ of God and of his creation, which the
poem performatively celebrates. The extreme brief-
ness of Ezra Pound’s poem ‘In a station of the metro’
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

iconically reflects the instantaneous associative per-
ception expressed in it. The size of Melville’s Moby
Dick is an iconic image of its huge subject, the whale.
In chapter 104, Melville explicitly refers to the iconic
relationship between his ‘‘mighty theme’’ and the
bulk of his ‘‘mighty book.’’ Joyce’s Finnegans wake,
by contrast, may be interpreted as a diagrammatic
icon of dreaming. Quite generally, the metonymic,
additive structuring of realistic texts are an effort to
offer icons of visible reality. As W. Bagehot observed,
Dickens’s complex and teeming novels reflect the un-
structured richness of a modern metropolis, which
also finds its daily icon in the newspaper front page.
Similarly, both Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The
waste land are, on one level at least, structural icons
of city-life in which, according to Pound (1921: 110),
‘‘the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap,
overcross, they are ‘cinematographic.’’’
Hemingway uses a chiastic arrangement in the
short story Indian camp on the level of narrative to
reflect the circularity of the cycle of day and night,
birth and death so central to the story. The narrative
of whole novels may also be organized chiastically as
Ljungberg (2001) has shown with respect to the fic-
tion of Margaret Atwood. Thus, The robber bride
(1993) has a chiastic narrative order: it is organized
by a frame narrative containing ‘three different nar-
rs
ratives, each of which forms a kind of palindrome in
time and space’ (ibid., 357), which has several iconic
Pe
narrative functions.
In his first novel Ochered’ (‘The queue’ 1985), the
Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin uses a (typographic)
structure that is defined by icons of space and time.
's
This novel, a polylogue comprised entirely of snatches
of conversation, mostly single words and phrases, has
or
no narrator and is about people standing in a queue,
waiting for roll-calls and passing their time by solving
crossword puzzles, reading aloud notices from the
th
newspaper, or discussing recent events. The excessive
length of the queue is iconically rendered by the length
Au
of the printed column of mostly brief utterances that
make up the whole novel, the repetition of identical
types of expressions, the linear sequence of names. By
creating the impression that the portrayal of depicted
time (42 hours) seemingly converges with the time of
depiction, the passage of time is also rendered iconi-
cally. The portrayal of a sexual act takes 18 pages and
the absence of speech, silence, or sleep, are typo-
graphically reflected by white pages (cf. Ohme,
2003).
Degrees of iconicity also may be discerned in the
narrative representation of speech and point of view.
The use of indirect speech, for instance, is less iconic
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Iconicity: Literary Texts 471
than free indirect speech and even less than written
dialogue, which is most mimetic of real speech. Interi-
or monologue (stream of consciousness) or digressive-
ness in narration is also highly iconic in its associative
rendering of mental processes. Wolf (2001) shows that
in the Romantic period landscape description began
to be presented as paintings that emanated from the
point of view of an involved viewer. In a similar way,
Tabakowska (1999) shows how the relation between
text and conceptual structure can be motivated by the
perception of chronology or spacing (perceptual ico-
nicity), but also by the perceiver’s order of knowledge
(experiential iconicity).
y
See also: Creativity in Language; Foregrounding; Iconicity:
op
Sign Language; Iconicity: Theory; Iconicity; Jakobson,
Roman: Theory of the Sign; Metaphor: Stylistic
Approaches; Morris, Charles: Theory of the Sign; Peirce,
Charles Sanders (1839–1914).
C
Bibliography
al
Anderson E R (1998). A grammar of iconism. London:
on Associated University Presses.
Attridge D (1982). The rhythms of English poetry. London:
Longman.
Barthes R (1967). ‘Proust et les noms.’ In To Honor Roman
Jakobson. Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birth-
day, 11 October 1966, 2 vols. The Hague: Mouton. I:
157.
Bernhart W (1977). ‘Heuristisches Modell eines funktiona-
len Literaturbegriffs.’ Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 3, 85–93.
Bolinger D (1980). Language – The loaded weapon.
London: Longman.
Cureton R (1980). ‘Poetic syntax and aesthetic form.’ Style
14, 318–340.
Cureton R (1986). ‘Visual form in e. e. cummings’ No
Thanks.’ Word and Image 2, 245–277.
Davie D (1955). Articulate energy. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Epstein E L (1975). ‘The self-reflexive artefact: the func-
tion of mimesis in an approach to a theory of value
for literature.’ In Fowler R (ed.) Style and structure in
literature: essays in the new stylistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
40–78.
Fischer A (1999). ‘What, if anything, is phonological
iconicity?.’ In Nänny & Fischer (eds.). 123–134.
Fischer O & Nänny M (eds.) (2001). The motivated
sign. Iconicity in language and literature 2. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Givón T (1985). ‘Iconicity, isomorphism and non-arbitrary
coding in syntax.’ In Haiman J (ed.) Iconicity in syntax.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 187–219.
Hollander J (1975). Vision and resonance: two senses of
poetic form. New York: Oxford University Press.
472 Iconicity: Literary Texts
Kouwenberg S (ed.) (2003). Twice as meaningful: redupli-
cation in pidgins, creoles and other contact languages.
London: Battlebridge.
Jakobson R (1971). ‘Quest for the essence of language
[1965].’ In Selected writings, Vol. II: Word and language.
The Hague: Mouton. 345–359.
Leech G & Short M (1981). Style in fiction. London:
Longman.
Ljungberg Ch (2001). ‘Iconic dimensions in Margaret
Atwood’s poetry and prose.’ In Fischer & Nänny (eds.).
351–366.
Maeder C, Fischer O & Herlofsky W J (eds.) (2005). Out-
side-in and inside-out. Iconicity in language and
literature 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Morris C (1946). Signs, language, and behaviour. New
York: Prentice Hall.
Müller W (1999). ‘Iconicity and rhetoric: a note on the
iconic force of rhetorical figures in Shakespeare.’ In
Nänny & Fischer (eds.). 305–322.
Müller W & Fischer O (eds.) (2003). From sign to signing.
Iconicity in language and literature 3. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Nänny M (1986). ‘Iconicity in literature.’ Word & Image 2,
al
199–208.
Nänny M & Fischer O (eds.) (1999). Form miming mean-
ing. Iconicity in language and literature. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
on
Nöth W (2001). ‘Semiotic foundations of iconicity in lan-
guage and literature.’ In Fischer & Nänny (eds.). 17–28.
rs
Nowottny W (1962). The language poets use. London:
Athlone Press.
Ohme A (2003). ‘Iconic representation of space and time in
Pe
Vladimir Sorokin’s novel The queue (Ochered’.)’ In
Fischer & Nänny (eds.). 153–165.
's
or
Iconicity, Sign Language
S Wilcox, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
th
NM, USA
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Au
‘Iconicity’ is a term coined by C. W. Morris (1901–
1979; see Morris, Charles (1901–1979)) that desig-
nates the measure of similarity between a sign and the
object to which it refers (Bussmann, 1996: 215). The
nature of this relation has been discussed and debated
since antiquity. Jakobson (1990) traces the crucial
question of iconicity’s role in language, whether lan-
guage attaches form to content by nature (physei) or
by convention (thesei), to Plato’s dialogue Cratylus.
Socrates, the moderator of this debate, tends to think
that representation by similarity is superior to the use
of arbitrary signs but in the end tends to accept the
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 5, pp. 462–472
Pateman T (1986). ‘Transparent and translucent icons.’
British Journal of Aesthetics 26, 380–382.
Peirce C S (1931–1958). Collected papers of Charles San-
ders Peirce, 8 vols. Hartshorne C, Weiss P & Burks A
(eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pound E (1921). ‘Poésies 1917–1920: Jean Cocteau.’ Dial
70, 110.
Ransom J C (1968). Quoted from his The world’s body
(1939) by Wellek R & Warren A (eds.) Theory of litera-
ture. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [1949], 162.
Saussure F de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Bally
C & Séchehaye A (eds.). Paris & Lausanne: Payot.
Spitzer L (1948). Linguistics and literary history. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tabakowska E (1999). ‘Linguistic expression of per-
y
ceptual relationships.’ In Nänny & Fischer (eds.).
409–422.
op
Ullmann S (1964). Language and style. Oxford: Blackwell.
White J (1999). ‘On semiotic interplay: forms of creative
interaction between iconicity and indexicality in
C
twentieth-century literature.’ In Nänny & Fischer (eds.).
83–108.
Wimsatt W K (1976). ‘In search of verbal mimesis (Supple-
ment to ‘Laokoon: An oracle reconsulted’).’ In Day of the
leopards: essays in defense of poems. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press. 57–73.
Wolf W (2001). ‘The emergence of experiential ico-
nicity and spatial perspective in landscape descrip-
tions in English fiction.’ In Fischer & Nänny (eds.).
323–350.
Wolf W (2005). ‘Non-supplemented blanks in works of
literature as forms of ‘‘iconicity of absence’’.’ In Maeder
et al. (eds.). 113–132.
position that conventionality plays a major role in
language.
In American linguistics, Dwight Whitney (1827–
1894; see Whitney, William Dwight (1827–1894))
also came down on the side of convention and was
instrumental in a worldwide acceptance of the
definition of language as a system of arbitrary
and conventional signs. Perhaps the most influential
linguist on this topic was Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913; see Saussure, Ferdinand (-Mongin) de
(1857–1913)), who, following Whitney, maintained
that ‘‘the bond uniting the signans with the signatum
is arbitrary’’ (Saussure, 1916: 67).
Linguists in the functionalist and cognitive schools
often regard iconicity as an essential feature of
language (Haiman, 1985). Givón’s iconic imperative
states that ‘‘all other things being equal, a coded