Iconicity, Schematicity, and Representation in Gesture

Abstract

Iconic aspects of postures and hand movements have long been a central issue in gesture research. A speaker's body may become a dynamic, viewpointed 'icon' (Peirce 1960) of someone or something else, or hands may create iconic signs. Recent research on iconicity in spoken and signed languages has (re)established its constitutive role in language (e.g. Jakobson 1990) and more broadly in multimodal interaction, which naturally includes iconic manual gestures and full-body enactments. Peircean semiotics are combined with cognitive linguistic accounts to demonstrate the role of iconicity in embodied conceptual and linguistic structures and to account for modality-specific manifestations of iconicity in gesture. We provide an overview of gestural modes of representation and techniques of depiction and exemplify the ways in which iconicity interacts with other semiotic principles, such as indexicality, viewpoint, and metonymy. The chapter also highlights empirical research into gestural iconicity as it relates to language acquisition, development, and processing, language and cognition, and the fields of computation and robotics.