Welcome to this first CogSeminar for the year, to be given by Dr. Inigo Bacaicoa, who is an AI researcher working on developing a formal and computationally implementable, and yet semiotically adequate theory of spoken language iconicity, in terms of dynamic patterns in "phonetic gestures": see the abstract below. The seminar will be given on zoom, but those who can are welcome to the H402 room, so as to continue with the hybrid format of the Cognitive Semiotics Seminar. Please come right after 15:00 for the usual self-introductions!

In this talk, I will propose a dynamic account of iconicity that situates motivated phonetic gestures within a broader framework of interpretation, intentionality, and embodied dynamics. Building on empirical work identifying recurrent, non-arbitrary phonosemantic operators across unrelated languages, I argue that these regularities cannot be fully explained as distributional correlations alone. Rather, they point toward a form of iconicity that is diagrammatic and dynamic in nature. 

To make this explicit, I suggest that iconicity should not be located in static form–meaning correspondences, but in the way particular phonetic gestures bias interpretive dynamics, reducing the cost of stabilizing certain intentional objects. From this perspective, meaning does not originate in the sign itself, but emerges from pre-signitive interpretive processes that precede conventional sign use. 

I will outline a formal framework in which signals, interpretive policies, and narrative states interact dynamically, and show how this framework helps bridge empirical phonosemantic patterns with a Peircean understanding of iconicity as resemblance grounded in lived, embodied experience. The aim is not to offer a complete theory, but to clarify how non-arbitrary phonetic gestures can function as motivated diagrams within ongoing processes of sense-making.