The project The Emergence and Stabilisation of Iconicity in Human Speech (ICONIC) recently secured funding from the Norwegian Research Council, providing crucial support to achieve its ambitious goals.
“Such an interdisciplinary project is not a one-man job. The grant allows me to hire a team and tackle some of the biggest questions about human language,” Professor Timo Roettger explains.
By combining insights from linguistics, psychology, and cultural evolution, Roettger’s project aims to emulate language evolution in the laboratory.
Dean of Research, Mathilde Skoie, is proud of the substantial funding the ICONIC project has received.
“This innovative approach not only pushes the boundaries of our understanding of language evolution but also exemplifies the kind of forward-thinking research that we take great pride in,” Skoie says.
Iconicity in language persists
“Linguists traditionally believe that a word's form doesn't relate to its meaning. For example, the Norwegian word “tre” or the German word “Baum” don’t sound like a tree,” Roettger explains.
Iconicity – where a word’s form resembles its meaning, like the word “boom”, which sounds like the loud, explosive sound it refers to – has been thought to be only marginal in human language, and that it disappears due to the way language changes over time.
However, this clashes with evidence that iconicity can and continues to be found in all aspects of modern languages, as people intuitively link sound to meaning.
“The ICONIC project aims to resolve this contradiction by demonstrating that iconicity can emerge and stabilise over time, rather than disappear,” Roettger says and continues:
“Ultimately, the ICONIC project will help us better understand why human language looks the way it does.”