巴西语言学会(Abralin, Associação Brasileira de Linguística)在疫情期间广泛联络世界各地知名语言学家，策划了Abralin Ao Vivo(即 Linguists Online)系列讲座，自去年5月起通过YouTube频道向全球直播。获邀参加的语言学家已超过百位，可谓大师云集，规模空前。陕西师大语言与认知研究所(CogLing.cn)与Abralin达成合作，获得独家内容授权，通过本微信公号向中国学者同行独家转发该系列讲座精选内容。
今日发布精选集第27期，主讲人波多·温特 (Bodo Winter)，讲座题目“Iconicity, not arbitrariness, is a design feature of language“，直播时间为2021年5月6日。本讲座视频英文字幕为本公号后期制作，限于精力，未经逐字校对，敬请谅解。
Bodo Winter
波多·温特 简介
I am a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. My research uses data science-driven linguistics to study multimodal communication, including iconicity, gesture and metaphor. For my Future Leaders Fellowship, I investigate how people communicate numerical information across different communication channels.
讲座英文摘要
Humans are natural-born communicators, using a rich semiotic toolkit spanning multiple communicative modalities, including speech, writing, sign, and gesture. Iconicity — the resemblance between form and meaning — is one important part of this toolkit. Examples of iconic communication include iconic gestures, such as pinching the fingers together to depict a small object, and onomatopoeias, such as using the English words “bang” and “beep” to imitate sounds. Traditionally, iconicity has been marginalized to the fringes of language, said to be the exception, rather than the rule. To this day, linguists and cognitive scientists are taught that language is instead ruled by the “principle of arbitrariness”, the idea that there is no direct relationship between form and meaning. In this talk, I will argue that this widely cited principle has it the wrong way around. Arbitrariness is actually not a design feature of language…. but iconicity is! To make my case, I will give an overview of exciting new experimental, corpus, and typological research that demonstrates how languages make much more use of iconicity than traditionally assumed, and how iconicity performs crucial functions in language acquisition and language evolution. Taken together, this research points to an ongoing iconicity revolution that is sweeping through linguistics and the cognitive sciences, fundamentally transforming the way we think about language.
讲座视频
公号菜单路径：视频——Abralin