#iconicity — Public Fediverse posts

“Propelled by our #algorithmic feeds onto every #smallscreen, in every conceivable format, #KimKardashian became less an individual #mega-celebrity than a scalable #digital #spectacle, attaining the kind of #iconicity that the entire family seems to crave …” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

How the Kardashians Became Fle...

"AI" image-generation software has led to an explosion of iconicity in certain domains: companies who couldn't (or didn't want) to hire a professional illustrator now sport heaps of hyper-detailed images on their social media accounts and storefronts. For example: food services (up to a certain degree). #observation #iconicity #image #generation #semiotics #company #urbanLandscape

With Floris Roelofsen and Beyza Sumer, we explored how different groups of raters perceive iconicity in #DutchSignLanguage (#NGT). We showed that deaf participants with and hearing participants without signing skills differed in their understanding of #iconicity across iconicity rating and a transparency task, while the linguistic and cultural differences between hearing Dutch and German raters hardly influenced their perceptions of iconicity.

📢 New publication Interested in #iconicity? Fascinated by #ideophones? Craving for #fieldwork in this area? Check out this book and ideas will come... I explain how to conduct #psycholinguistic research in #minority languages such as #Basque @oxfordacademic.bsky.social @psylexlab.bsky.social

New! A multi-methods toolkit for ideophone research, w/ Bonnie McLean

⛓️‍💥 :OpenAccess: PDF https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_3644631_1/component/file_3644632/McLean%20Dingemanse%202025%20Multi-methods%20toolkit%20for%20documentary%20research%20on%20ideophones.pdf

On the blog: https://ideophone.org/new-methods-for-ideophone-research/

#ideophones #iconicity

New preprint! Triangulating iconicity, with Stella Punselie & Bonnie McLean (Uppsala) https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z9a4e

We combine three ways of looking at the iconicity of 239 #ideophones from 5 languages: (i) coding structural correspondences between form and meaning; (ii) collecting subjective iconicity ratings, and (iii) relating these to performance in guessing tasks. Triangulation contributes to an empirically grounded, theoretically informed, experimentally robust understanding of #iconicity.

Having fun with logical types

Four years since this paper came out. We did it as a side project so the epigraph is doubly apposite

We investigated the utility of vector-based distributional semantics for lexical norm imputation — and cautioned against uncritical use. Today I see people using LLMs to do this and our caution still holds: "Norm imputation can distort rating scales and can amplify rating artefacts"

:OpenAccess: + open data & code https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2019.49

#iconicity #linguistics

In our latest paper (now online), written in collaboration with Oksana Kanerva, we examined the effect of iconicity on recognition of onomatopoeic words (e.g., bang, crash). Such words depict sounds and indicate action connected to these sounds. Iconicity, for one, refers to the relationship between word form and meaning of words. The more iconic the word is, the more it resembles the sound in question.

1/4

https://doi.org/10.7557/6.6880

#EyeTracking #iconicity #onomatopoeia #VisualWorldParadigm

'The maluma/takete effect is late' :OpenAccess: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287831 by David Sidhu and many others — a set of well-designed experiments with infants at 4, 8, 12mo finds no evidence for sound symbolic sensitivity at an early age (as we suspected, see https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920914339 ). More evidence for the role of learning & linguistic experience in #iconicity #SoundSymbolism

Beautiful paper by @c_borstell on iconic plurality across languages. I particularly like the way the diagrams make visible cross-modal similarities and differences in reduplicative strategies across signed and spoken languages https://borstell.github.io/pdfs/borstell_iconic_plurality_across_modalities.pdf #iconicity

Very interesting to see new empirical work on iconicity and word learning in languages other than English — here, Turkish, which, like Japanese, has a sizable stock of iconic expressions https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2023.2257177 #iconicity

Come check out my first presentation at #ICLC16

Next Monday, 11.45 right after the first plenary.

Here's the reveal of our opening slide!

#ABB #iconicity #ratings #norms #corpus #convergingEvidence

Work with Xiaoyu Yu, Tung-Le Pan, and Youngah Do

New blog: consolidating iconicity research — on a serendipitous bouquet of 3 new #iconicity papers https://ideophone.org/consolidating-iconicity-research/

🧵1/n The papers stem from different collaborations (Birmingham, Uppsala and Hong Kong), had very different timelines, and yet in a neat coincidence they all came out this month, allowing me to highlight some of the complementary theoretical and methodological contributions.

Work with @Thomastodont and many non-fedi authors — thanks for reading!

It's #iconicity month! New paper out with @Thomastodont, Arthur Thompson & Youngah Do — and since Thomas is involved, we've got lovely figures and fully open data and code

:OpenAccess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.13268

Is my alphabet better than yours? Interesting findings on the degree to which signers feel that their manual signs for letters are iconic (and how they compare to the alphabet of another sign language)

By @c_borstell, which means that the graphics are gorgeous, too: https://borstell.github.io/pdfs/borstell2023_poster.pdf

@linguistics #iconicity #SignLanguage

🎉 New paper led by the amazing Bonnie McLean! "Two measures are better than one: combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon"
:OpenAccess: :doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.9

This is Bonnie's 1st PhD paper (w/ Michael Dunn & myself) and it's #openscience all the way: open access paper with all materials on OSF & with a :python: #python package `icotools` to boot

#iconicity #ideophones @linguistics

@electrocutie @kor8rok @bright_helpings An interesting variant on the known spiky/smooth shape associations

#linguistics #iconicity

There was a tumblr post with just the animal icons of this image, and I was punched directly in the first grade. I recognized them *immediately*. This is some true #iconicity
https://www.loc.gov/item/78696029/
#dcZoo #nationalZoo

Are you interested in linguistic #iconicity, the resemblance between form and meaning?
Sign up for the #IcoSem 2022 here:
https://forms.gle/xkKbn9YbkXirGVDT9

Animated Logical Graphs • 6

Re: Peirce List • Jim Willgoose

At root we are dealing with a genre of very abstract formal systems.  They have grammars that determine their well-formed expressions and rules that determine the permissible transformations among expressions, but they lack all logical meaning until we supply an interpretation.

The formal system Peirce developed for propositional logic and Spencer Brown resurrected for his Laws of Form admits a formal duality which allows it to be fleshed out with logical meanings in two distinct ways.  The two interpretations are employed in Peirce’s entitative graphs and existential graphs, respectively.  It is clear from everything they write that both authors are well aware of both interpretations, but Peirce would come to found his later developments on the existential sense while Spencer Brown favored the entitative sense in his expositions.

See the following readings for further discussion.

• Logical Graphs • Formal Development ☞ This Blog • OEIS Wiki

References

• Theme One Program • User Guide
• Applications of a Propositional Calculator • Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Animated Logical Graphs • 3

Re: Peirce List • Helmut Raulien

I have a little more leisure now to start climbing back into the saddle, so let me see where we left off …

Try looking into the article I linked before:

• Logical Graphs

Or my first couple of blog posts on Logical Graphs:

• Logical Graphs • First Impressions
• Logical Graphs • Formal Development

There are literally decades of thought and work that went into those, and if they do not engage the reader in the excitement of possible future developments then I would sorely appreciate any feedback on where and why they fail to do so.

George Spencer Brown is one of the few writers I’ve run across in the time since my first encounter with Peirce’s logical graphs who truly grasped the full depth of Peirce’s insight into logic, a vision that pierced the veil of logical interpretations, entitative and existential, to the deep formal unity between them.  That is one of the reasons I’ve made an effort to treat the two interpretations in parallel as far as I was able.  It is an extremely enticing research question to me whether that symmetry is necessarily broken as we pass from propositional to quantificational logic, or whether there is some way it may be or need be maintained.

But that is a question for the future …

Resource

• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs

Animated Logical Graphs • 2

Re: Peirce List • Jim Willgoose

It’s almost 50 years now since I first encountered the volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers in the math library at Michigan State, and shortly afterwards a friend called my attention to the entry for Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form in the Whole Earth Catalog and I sent off for it right away.  I would spend the next decade just beginning to figure out what either one of them was talking about in the matter of logical graphs and I would spend another decade after that developing a program, first in Lisp and then in Pascal, that turned graph‑theoretic data structures formed on their ideas to good purpose as the basis of its reasoning engine.

I thought it might contribute to a number of long‑running and ongoing discussions if I could articulate what I think I learned from that experience.

So I’ll try to keep focused on that.

Resources

• Logical Graphs • First Impressions
• Logical Graphs • Formal Development
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Animated Logical Graphs • 1

For Your Musement …

Here are some animations I made up to illustrate several different styles of proof in an extended topological variant of Peirce’s Alpha Graphs for propositional logic.

• Proof Animations
• Double Negation
• Peirce’s Law
• Praeclarum Theorema
• Two‑Thirds Majority Function

A full discussion of logical graphs can be found in the following article.

• Logical Graphs

Resources

• Logical Graphs • First Impressions
• Logical Graphs • Formal Development
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi