Bruce Mannheim

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Iconicity

I
conicity is a relationship between a sign and its object (often a linguistic
pattern or another sign) in which the form of the sign recapitulates the
object in some way. Charles Sanders Peirce defined an icon as a "sign
by virtue of its own quality and [a] sign of whatever else partakes of that
quality." Even the most "natural" looking icon, though, is mediated
through social convention and subject to the historically specific interpre-
tative habits of its users. Consider the skull-and-crossbones, used for much
of the last century to mark poisons. Some children interpreted the icon
through an alternate set of conventions to mean "pirate food/' and a
concerted effort was made to replace it with another conventional icon,
"Mister Yucky."
Peirce identified three main subtypes of icons: images, diagrams, and
metaphors. Images "partake of the simple qualities" of their objects. They
may be graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal—as W. J. T. Mitchell
has observed—but what they have in common is that the form of the sign
reflects its object directly and concretely. Sound images include verbal signs
that are sometimes referred to as "sound symbolic" or "onomatopoeic."
Diagrams are signs that represent the relations of the parts of their objects
by analogous relationships among their own parts. It is commonplace in
narrative, for example, for the order of narrative to diagram the order of
narrated events. Metaphors are signs that represent "a parallel in something
else," often through a vaguely sensed affinity. Constellations of words in
which a similarity of form evokes a similarity of meaning, such as the sl-
words in English (slip, slide, slush, sleaze, etc., described by Dwight Bolin-
ger) are instances of metaphoric iconicity.
Iconicity has several key effects: It naturalizes one set of semiotic distinc-
tions by referring it to another that is understood by the speakers to be
more basic, essential, outside volitional control, or outside culture. It allows
particular linguistic and cultural patterns to be referred to each other, such
that they become mutually interpreting. Along the same vein, the alignment

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(l-2):107-l 10. Copyright © 2000, American Anthropological

Association.

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108 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

of structural forms across distinct cultural domains unifies cultural patterns;

a song can be iconic of a textile. It fits the form of a speech event closely
to the specific contours of its setting, making it compelling to the participants
and providing cues that they use to interpret it. Finally, by bringing distind
cultural and linguistic structures into structural alignment it enhances theii
cognitive retention by individuals, as Dedre Gentner has shown. As a form
of structural alignment, iconicity is important in both the transmission and
persistence of cultural forms.
When signs are taken individually, they seem relatively unmotivated.
When they are seen as parts of larger clusters—actions, patterns, texts, con-
versations, grammars, cultures—iconicity, and especially diagrammaticity,
looms large in understanding how they cluster and interact, as pointed oui
by Paul Friedrich. All three Peircian subtypes of iconicity figure in ethno-
graphic analyses, from the macro-organization of social systems to the mi-
cro-organization of the lexicon. The examples below illustrate the perva-
siveness of iconicity in language-and-culture.
Naturalizes one set ofsemiotic distinctions by referring it to another: It is com-
mon for political systems to naturalize a particular social order by laying ii
out territorially and in calendrical time. For example, the Inka capital Cuzco
(in the research of Zuidema, Sherbondy, and Bauer) was organized into a
nested system of hierarchically ranked sightlines radiating from the ritual
center. Each node was associated with a specific social segment, ranked
according to its position in the system. The sightlines defined a set of irri-
gation districts, determining each group's rights to specific sources of water
(and hence to specific agricultural lands). Social segments were associated
with sacred places ranked along the same sightlines and were responsible
for tending mem on specific ritual occasions, sequenced by position on the
system of sightlines. In short, the spatial organization of Inka Cuzco was a
diagrammatic icon of the relationships among social segments, irrigatior
rights, and ritual responsibilities. Similarly, Richard Parmentier shows thai
social segmentation and hierarchy in Belau were made to seem natural and
inevitable through diagrammatic iconicity.
"Click" (velar) sounds entered the Nguni language of southern Africa, as
discussed by Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, from neighboring Khoi languages;
spreading through an Nguni speech register that expressed social distance
and deference. Thus clicks came to be interpreted as icons of foreigness,
both expressing the social distance implied by use of the respect register
and naturalizing an essentialized social distance.
Allows particular linguistic and cultural patterns to become mutually interpret-
ing: Among Kaluli in Melanesia, the gisaroritual—discussedby Steven Fek
and Edward L. Schieffelin—establishes a diagrammatic correspondence
among a specific myth, the social orders of birds and humans, the ritua
enactment of birdness by humans in the ritual. The tonal structure of son|
diagrams the calls of birds being enacted by ritual dancers. J. Becker anc
A. L. Becker showed that in Javanese the diagrammatic correspondena
among melodic cycles, the organization of performance, and calendric cycles
similarly unifies these domains. Barbara and Dennis Tedlock have showr
Iconicity 109

that Quiche Mayan textiles can be read intertextually as diagrams of verbal

texts-narratives and of divinatory performances, and vice-versa.
The order of suffixes in the Southern Quechua verb (Mannheim) is a
diagrammatic icon of the degree to which they express the subjective posi-
tions of participants in the speech event, such that the least deictic suffixes
appear closer to the verb stem, with person and tense appearing near the
end, and evidentials, which express the speaker's subjective orientation to-
ward the message appearing at the very end of the verb. In historical lin-
guistics, morphological changes are partly predictable as shifts toward a
diagrammatic economy of representation in which relationships among
forms come to diagram their semantic relationships (Andersen), as Watkins
has shown for the history of the Celtic person system.
Fits the form of a speech event closely to the specific contours of its setting: In
lowland Ecuadorian Quichua narrative, iconic aspectual expressions punc-
tuate narrative, creating a sense of verisimilitude linking the performance
of the narrative with the events being described. In Nahuatl narrative, spe-
cific socially located "voices" are marked with characteristic intonations that
allow listeners to track the voices across the narrative and connect the voices
to their social locations. Roman Jakobson suggested that as a pragmatic
principle of language, the default (or unmarked) setting is to treat the order
of events in narrative as a diagrammatic icon of their order "in the world";
any non-default interpretation requires special narrative devices. Similarly,
the hierarchy of conjoined nouns—by default—reflects the presupposed hi-
erarchy of their referents.
In short, iconicity can inhere in virtually any aspect of language, culture,
and society, making reference to the world assumed to be outside of lan-
guage; to aspects of the social situation; to crystallized patterns elsewhere
in the language or culture; to essentialized social domains; and from one
piece of a text or of a social performance and another. One analytic goal of
linguistic anthropologists and other ethnographers is to make these iconic
linkages explicit.
(See also ideophone, indexicality, media, narrative, orality, vision, writing)

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Department of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
brucem@quriurqu.anthro.lsa.umich.edu