| Popis: |
Linguistic iconicity, the detection of analogies between content and form, between the signans and the signatum, the identification of ways in which ‘form mimes meaning’ (Fischer and Nanny 1999), has attracted a lot of interest in the last two decades. As the word ‘analogies’ suggests, the notion of ‘similarity’, as defined by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1991) and much later by Roman Jakobson (1965/1990), is seminal, underlying the representational function of semiotic relations and determining their non-arbitrariness. It is this notion that forms the focal feature of the present chapter. Thus, focusing on syntactic — or ‘diagrammatic’ — iconicity and, more specifically, on the similarity between the order and intensity of experience and the ordering of sentential constituents, I will discuss the iconic properties of two different text types, poetry and timelines, and propose a directness–indirectness continuum along which iconic effects may be said to operate. In doing so, I borrow the notion of less and more prototypical genres from cognitive grammarians (Brugman and Lakoff 1988/2006; Geeraerts 1989/2006; Langacker 1998a, b, 2008). Cognitive grammar may lend itself particularly readily to considerations of iconicity in that it revolves around the idea that perceptual experience imprints itself upon language. On the basis of these arguments I suggest that similarity between meaning and form may need to co-determine translation choices across genres, at least with regard to syntax. |
