Greg Woodin

This chapter presents a definition of iconicity, highlighting its prevalence across broad swathes of communication, and arguing that iconicity is fundamentally continuous and subjective. The chapter then explores the functions of iconicity, and closes with a discussion of the possible role of iconicity in the origins of languages, emphasizing the centrality of iconicity in our understanding of languages and their evolution.

There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). This paper is the first to investigate the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

We analysed more than 1.7 million occurrences of numbers between 0 and a billion in the British National Corpus, finding that four main factors affect number frequency: magnitude, roundness, cultural salience, and register. In writing, we find that the numbers 1–9 are mostly represented by number words (e.g., ‘three’), 10–999,999 are mostly represented by numerals (e.g., ‘14’), and 1 million–1 billion are mostly represented by a mix of numerals and number words (e.g., ‘8 million’).

We conducted two experiments (N = 300 per experiment) where participants answered questions about line graphs depicting good and bad quantities. Our results suggest that conceptual metaphors matter for the interpretation of line graphs. However, designers of line graphs are warned against subverting graphical convention to align with conceptual metaphors.

Using the TV News Archive, we showed that, generally, the hands of gesturers mirror the size-based frame implied by concurrent speech (e.g., a closed-hand gesture for the phrase 'tiny number'). This paper is the first large-scale, quantitative demonstration that the TV News Archive can provide a unique window into metaphorical thought.

In a task where participants placed words in space, participants preferred the vertical axis for quantity words and valence words, and the horizontal axis for numerals and time words. Across all tasks, participants tended to use specific axes (horizontal, vertical), rather than combining these two axes in diagonal responses. These results shed light on the spatial nature of abstract thought.