Forms, Mechanisms, and Roles of Iconicity in Spoken Language: A Review

Historically, debates over relationships between spoken lexical form and meaning have been dominated by views of arbitrariness. However more recent research revealed a different perspective, in which non-arbitrary mappings play an important role in the makeup of a lexicon. It is now clear that phoneme-sound symbolism - along with other types of form-to-meaning mappings - contributes to non-arbitrariness (iconicity) of spoken words, which is present in many forms and degrees in different languages. Attempts have been made to provide a mechanistic explanation of the phenomenon, and these theories largely centre around cross-modal correspondences. We build on these views to explore iconicity within the evolutionary context and the neurobiological framework for human language processing. We argue that the multimodal bihemsipheric communicative system, to which iconicity is integral, has important phylogenetic and ontogenetic advantages, facilitating language learning, comprehension, and processing. Despite its numerous advantages however, iconicity must compete with arbitrariness, forcing language systems to balance the competing needs of perceptual grounding of the linguistic form and ensuring an effective signal. We conclude that, on balance, iconicity should be viewed as integral to language, and not merely a marginal phenomenon.