Welcome to this highly relevant seminar on the topic of iconicity, across several semiotic systems, based on collaboration between our MA student Daiya Kuryu, and Dr. Manon Lelandais from Paris! Daiya will present IRL, while Dr. Lelandais on zoom. We start at 15:00 as usual, with introductions! Please let me know if you will join us for the post-seminar by May 19.

In this talk, we report on a study that investigates a previously unexplored question in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semiotics: Does iconicity in morphosyntax boost the likelihood of concurrent co-expressive iconic forms in other semiotic systems—specifically, gesture and intonation? Building on our previous work on ‘over and over (again)’ and its gestural correlates (Kuryu, 2025; Lelandais, 2024), we compare this expression with its non-iconic counterpart ‘repeatedly’ and its even more iconic variant ‘over and over and over (again)’. The results revealed four key findings:

(i) Repeated beat gestures, being co-expressive with the accompanying verbal expressions through diagrammatic iconicity, increased in likelihood in proportion to the degree of morphosyntactic iconicity.

(ii) Morphosyntactic iconicity also had a significant effect on cyclic gestures (Ladewig, 2011), which were rarely found with ‘repeatedly’.

(iii) Morphosyntactic iconicity significantly influenced vocal iconicity, manifested as tonal duplications (i.e., repeated intonational patterns on separate syllables).

(iv) Vocal iconicity (tonal duplications) had a significant effect on co-expressive iconic gestures (i.e., repeated beats and cyclic gestures) only in the case of ‘over and over (again)’, but not for the other two expressions.

As the interpretation of these results is still ongoing, we would greatly appreciate feedback from the audience—particularly from cognitive-semiotic and phenomenological perspectives. 

Kuryu, D. (2025). Crossmodal collostructional analysis of English [ADV and ADV] constructions: multimodal constructions or crossmodal collostructions? Language and Cognition, 17, e39, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2025.8 

Ladewig, S. (2011). Putting the cyclic gesture on a cognitive basis. CogniTextes, 6, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.4000/cognitextes.406. 

Lelandais, M. (2024). Multimodal marks of iteration in discourse. Faits de Langues, 53(2), 41–68. https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-53020003.