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PRIMATE CALLS… Robbins Burling, et. al. Current Anthropology Vol 34 no. 1

Iconic calls and gestures

Iconic calls and gestures mimic the forms of the things they stand for (such as outlining shapes or moving your hands back and forth multiple times to show repetition.) Iconic calls and gestures are not formally considered language, or language-like communication in that they do not contrast or possess arbitrary characteristics. Noises that imitate sounds of the surrounding environment (ideophones,) are also iconic. Though humans possess a repertoire of iconic calls and gestures, mammals produce very few signals that are iconic in any way. Despite this, a few captive chimpanzees have shown the beginning stages of iconicity. Burling et. al. states: "Chimpanzees in the wild do not point, and rarely do so in captivity, however there is a documented case of one named Kanzi, described by Savag-Rumbaugh et al., who could indicate direction of travel by 'extending his hand.' Another chimpanzee, Viki (Hayes and Nissen 1971:107) made motions of kneading or ironing when she wanted to knead dough or iron napkins." Bee dances are another example of iconicity in animal communication systems.

See p. 30,31 of Burling Robbins (1993), "Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication [and Comments and Reply]", Current Anthropology Vol. 34 No. 1, Feb. 1993, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

THE CASE FOR SOUND SYMBOLISM by Janis B. Nuckolls Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999 28:225-52

Vowel Magnitude Relationships

Sapir ran a test asking subjects to differentiate between two different sized tables using invented word pairs such as "mal" and "mil." He discovered a word containing /a/ was at four times more likely to be judged as larger if paired with a word containing /i/. Nuckolls states: "Newman discovered that… as the tongue recedes in articulating vowels from the front to the back of the mouth, and as acoustic frequencies become lower, the vowels are judged to be larger and darker." Bentley and Varron (1933)…found only moderate success rates when the subjects are not given the option of comparing the two vowel forms to a provided attribute. They still found that /a/ sounds were judged larger or lower than /i/ sounds.

In morphology, examples from degree adjectives, such as long, longer, longest, show that the most extreme degree of length is iconically represented by the word with the greatest number of phonemes. Jackobson cites examples of word order mimicking the natural order of ideas. In fact, iconicity is now widely acknowledged to be a significant factor at many levels of linguistic structure.