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What is striking about this and the other examples discussed by Jacquemet is that the “metapragmatic attack” takes place right after the prior speaker used the full pronoun tu. In the example above, speaker LM is already addressing speaker Pan in the T-form in line 01 (non deviare means “(you, sing.) do not deviate,” that is, “stick to the point”). The “attack,” however, does not take place until LM has used the full pronoun tu in line 07. This not only confirms my earlier hypothesis that the optional presence of full subject pronouns in Italian might carry an affective load, but that, as suggested by Silverstein, different linguistic forms evoke different levels of awareness in speakers-hearers.

6.8From symbols to indexes

The discussion in the last section has highlighted an important feature of linguistic anthropological studies of grammatical forms. They are concerned with what these forms do. In order to find out what they do, researchers need to pay attention to the context in which they are used. A pronoun like the Italian tu, for example, may have a pragmatic effect that is not predictable solely on the basis of its grammatical meaning (tu = “second person singular”). It is such a pragmatic effect that makes the use of the pronoun in (48) problematic.

Most grammarians try to avoid discussion of the pragmatic effects of linguistic expressions by focusing on words as symbols. They treat linguistic expression as signs whose meaning is strictly defined by convention (Peirce 1940). Symbols are arbitrary representations of meanings (Saussure 1959). To say that the English word go is a symbol means that it has no iconic or indexical relation with the concept it represents. The lack of iconic relation between a word like go

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and what it stands for is usually demonstrated by pointing out that other languages have totally different sound sequences for the same concept. Italian uses andare, Samoan alu, English go. When philosophers and grammarians work on language and use words like go, love, red, house, bird, or sentences like all men are mortal, birds fly, love is an emotion, they are relying on words as symbols. In the next sections, I will briefly discuss two other kinds of signs, icons and indexes, which have different properties from symbols. Icons suggest similarity between words and objects or events and indexes, as we already saw in section 1.4.2, have an existential relation with their referent (Burks 1948–49: 674) and therefore they force us to deal with context.

6.8.1Iconicity in languages

An icon is a sign that exhibits or exemplifies its object or referent – this often means that an icon resembles its referent in some respect. Pictures as well as diagrams are typical examples of icons.28 But words can also have an iconic character. This is the case, for instance, in onomatopoeic words, that is, words that, although in a conventional way, do try to reproduce some aspect of the sound they represent or of the sound effects caused by the activity described by the word (English ding-dong, splash, plop, whack, Japanese gacha-gacha “rattle,” shabu-shabu

“splish-splash,” kasa-kasa “rustle”). These phenomena are part of a larger class of iconic properties of linguistic sounds, generally included under the more general phenomenon of phonosymbolism (or sound symbolism). In addition to onomatopoeia, other recognized iconic phenomena include the use of intonation, lengthening, and volume to emphasize particular emotional states or stances and the correspondence between certain types of sounds and certain meanings (Berlin 1992; Cardona 1976: 161–3; Hinton et al 1994; Samarin 1971; Swadesh 1972). Such iconic aspects of linguistic sounds can be language specific or universal. In English, for example, words starting with /sl-/ have been said to be associated with unpleasant experiences (slime, slither, slug, sloppy) (Crystal

28For Peirce even an algebraic formula can be an icon. In this case, the likeness with the “object” it represents is rendered by conventional rules. “... an algebraic formula is an icon, rendered such by the rules of commutation, association, and distribution of the symbols. It may seem at first glance that it is an arbitrary classification to call an algebraic expression an icon; that it might as well, or better, be regarded as a compound conventional sign. But it is not so. For a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its construction. Thus, by means of two photographs a map can be drawn, etc. Given a conventional or other general sign of an object, to deduce any other truth than that which it explicitly signifies, it is necessary, in all cases, to replace that sign by an icon. This capacity of revealing unexpected truth is precisely that wherein the utility of algebraic formulae consists, so that the iconic character is the prevailing one” (Peirce 1940: 105–6).

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1987: 174), in Hausa the sounds /kw, gw, ‘kw/ – all requiring rounding of the lips

– have been said to be associated with round objects (Gouffé 1966), and in Japanese the syllable /ra/ is found in the names of monsters of great size (Beatty 1994). Swadesh (1972: 141) pointed out that in many languages a high front vowel like [i] tends to be used to express nearness whereas non-front or back vowels like [a] and [u] tend to be used for distance. Brent Berlin, who studied the phenomenon of non-arbitrariness of names for plants and animals in many languages, found that in Huambisa Jivaro names for birds tend to have high front vowels much more often than names for fish. Berlin also tested an earlier hypothesis by Yakov Malkiel about the tendency to have the sound [r] in names for “frog” in Indo-European languages and found that [r] and the phonetically closely related [l] are also the most common sounds for names of frogs and toads in thirty-three non-Indo-European languages (Berlin 1992: 250). Hays (1994) reanalyzed the data, adding a wider spectrum of languages and found that there is support for Berlin’s hypothesis, but there is even stronger evidence for /g/ and related sounds (e.g. /k/, [x], [ŋ]) in frog names in many languages around the world.

Although there is no general theory about why sound symbolism should occur, a variety of scholars agree that some languages (e.g. Korean, Japanese, Gbeya, Quechua) make abundant iconic use of sounds and that much more attention is due to these phenomena (see Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala 1994). Sound symbolism has been often associated with particular linguistic families. Thus, Bantu languages are well known for their ideophones at least since Doke (1935) introduced the term to refer to a vast range of onomatopoeic words that do not fit within other known grammatical categories.29 More recently, ethnomusicologists like Steven Feld (1982) and sociocultural anthropologists like Ellen Basso (1985) have studied sound symbolism in the context of live verbal and musical performance. By studying sound symbolism in Pastaza Quechua narratives, instead of looking at isolated words, Nuckolls (1992, 1995) has been able to argue that sound symbolic words should not be studied only as iconic signs, given that they also share features of other kinds of signs such as symbols and indexes (see below).

Peirce originally distinguished between different kinds of iconicity, including what Haiman (1980) calls “imagic” and “diagrammatic.” The examples mentioned so far are all imagic, given that the sign resembles the referent in some characteristic. Diagrammatic iconicity refers to an arrangement of signs “whose relationships to each other mirror the relationships of their referents” (Haiman 1980: 515). A classic example of this is the sequence of sentences in a narrative.

29See also Samarin (1967). On the issue of whether ideophones in Bantu and other African languages should be considered adverbs, see Moshi (1993).

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