Frequency vs. Iconicity in Explainin Grammatical Asymmetries – Haspelmath (200?)<\/p>\n
Iconicity is the claim that the structure of language reflects the structure of experience.\u00a0 Many phenomena accounted for by iconicity are in fact accounted for by the principle of economy.\u00a0 Iconicity of quantity where forms denoting greater quantity are longer is explained by the fact that the shorter forms are more frequently used and should be shorter based on economy of the length of linguistic form.\u00a0 In a similar way Haspelmath accounts for iconicity of complexity where more complex meaning are expressed by more complex forms by demonstrating the more complex meaning s are less frequent and are therefore optimally encoded by longer forms.\u00a0 Iconicity of cohesion claims that meanings that belong together more closely semantically are expressed by more cohesive forms.\u00a0 This is also debunked in favor of a frequency based explanation.\u00a0 The economy explanation also helps explain numerous counterexamples to iconicity claims.\u00a0 The take away message is that markedness and iconicity are epiphenomena to be banished from linguistic theory in favor of explanations based on relative frequency of occurrence and economy.\u00a0 While the paper is in a position to make use of large amount of corpus evidence to support the claims relatively little is used.\u00a0 This is unfortunate but Hapelmath’s claims provide motivation for future research and validation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Frequency vs. Iconicity in Explainin Grammatical Asymmetries – Haspelmath (200?) Iconicity is the claim that the structure of language reflects the structure of experience.\u00a0 Many phenomena accounted for by iconicity are in fact accounted for by the principle of economy.\u00a0 Iconicity of quantity where forms denoting greater quantity are longer is explained by the fact […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-papers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}