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Iconicity and Generative Grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Frederick J. Newmeyer
Frederick J. Newmeyer*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
*
Department of Linguistics, GN-40, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
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Abstract

A theme running through much of the functionalist literature in linguistics is that grammatical structure, to a considerable degree, has an ‘iconic’ motivation. This theme can be distilled into three rather distinct claims: (1) iconic principles govern speakers’ choices of structurally available options in discourse; (2) structural options that reflect discourse-iconic principles become grammaticalized; (3) grammatical structure is an iconic reflection of conceptual structure.

After presenting numerous examples from the functionalist literature in support of the idea that iconicity is widespread in language, I argue that claim (1) is irrelevant to generative grammar; claim (2), if correct, poses no challenge to generative grammar, despite a widespread belief to the contrary; and claim (3) has literally been built into standard versions of generative grammar. I go on to discuss the implications of iconic relations in language for the autonomy hypothesis and, at a more speculative level, for the evolution of language.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 756 - 796
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Matthew Dryer, Sarah Thomason, David Wilkins, and an anonymous referee for penetrating comments on a prefinal version of the manuscript and Ellen Prince for helping me to clarify my thinking on the concept of iconicity (without thereby implying that any of the above agree with a word of the paper).

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