Wittgenstein: Iconicity in Language and «Experience of Meaning»

  • Carolina Scotto Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
Keywords: Iconicity, Sound Symbolism, Linguistic Synaesthesia, Experience of Meaning, Wittgenstein

Abstract

Facing the almost unanimous acceptance of the arbitrariness of linguistic sign thesis, it is possible, relying on recent cognitive linguistic research, to argue for the relative importance of iconicity in natural languages. Different expressions of the iconic phenomenon known as «sound symbolism», moreover, strengthen a multimodal approach to language, in opposition to the prevalent view in linguistics as well as in the analytic philosophy of language. In this paper, my aim is to show that Wittgenstein has correctly identified these iconic and multimodal phenomena as cases of “experience of meaning” and that his investigations are compatible with the mentioned empirical results.

Author Biography

Carolina Scotto, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina

CAROLINA SCOTTO, is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and Researcher of the CONICET, Instituto de Humanidades, UNC-CONICET, Argentina. PhD in Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, she is a specialist in philosophy of mind and language. She published articles about intentional attribution, folk psychology, empathy, social cognition and animal thought, and about many aspects of the philosophy of mind and language of the second Wittgenstein. She was Dean of the Faculty on Philosophy and Humanities, UNC, from 1999 to 2005 and Rector of the UNC, from 2007 to 2013.

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Published
2017-12-22
How to Cite
[1]
Scotto, C. 2017. Wittgenstein: Iconicity in Language and «Experience of Meaning». Disputatio. 6, 7 (Dec. 2017), 423-457. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1418402.
Section
Articles and Essays