Unconventional Iconicity can be Conventional: evidence from demonstrations following quotatives in American English

Abstract

Some languages have more forms of conventional iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do English speakers depict percepts when ideophones are lacking? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations with features from Güldemann's (2008) observations: enacted verbal behavior, non-linguistic sound imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engaging in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken communication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audio-visual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can’t go over the ocean!) was in a demonstration, then it was vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstrations uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) were in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depended on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable (Cormier et al. 2013; Ferrara & Johnston 2014; Hodge & Ferrara 2014). These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the well-formedness of demonstrations. References: Cormier, Kearsy, Sandra Smith, & Martine Zwets (2013). Framing Constructed Action in British Sign Language Narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 55: 119-139. Ferrara, Lindsay & Trevor Johnston (2014). Elaborating Who’s What: A Study of Constructed Action and Clause Structure in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Australian Journal of Linguistics 34 (2): 193–215. Hodge, Gabrielle & Lindsay Ferrara (2014). Showing the story: Enactment as performance. In L. Gwane & J. Vaughan (Eds.), Selected Papers in Selected Papers from the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society 2013. (pp. 372-397).http://hdl.handle.net/11343/40973 Güldemann, Tom. (2008). Quotative Indexes in African Languages: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey. Berlin: Walter de Guyter. https://pure.au.dk/portal/files/153458379/Book_of_Abstracts_ILL12.pdf