Monday Colloquium: Who needs iconicity anyway? (Gareth Roberts; University of Pennsylvania)

Talk Abstract: Arbitrariness and iconicity in language have been talked about in one way or another since the earliest days of the field. Earlier work tended to emphasize the arbitrariness as a “design feature” of language. More recent work, however, has tended to focus on the pervasiveness of iconicity, in both signed and vocal languages. Some work has focused in particular on the benefits of iconicity in supporting the bootstrapping of new communication systems (including new sign languages, such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, and “laboratory languages” in experimental contexts) and of new referring expressions in established ones. Such work tends to concentrate primarily on the transparency benefits for the audience, but what of the production benefits for the signer or speaker? Might those also play an important role? More explicitly evolutionary approaches frame the role of iconicity in terms of the selective advantage it might confer in competition between forms; iconic forms, that is, might be more memorable and noticeable and thus more likely to be used, and transmitted. But is that in fact the case? In this talk I will present experiments that shed nuanced, and perhaps surprising, light on these questions, contributing also to our understanding of how languages get off the ground, why they change, and how much alignment is needed between interlocutors for communication to succeed.