It has long been a general assumption that natural languages exhibit an arbitrary pairing of form and meaning. The arbitrary mapping of form to meaning has even been formulated as a defining property for natural languages (Hockett 1960). In recent years, however, there is increasing empirical evidence that iconicity in language is more pervasive than often thought.

For example, Blasi et al. (2016) show in their study about the 100 most important vocabularies in over 4000 languages strikingly similar non-arbitrary sound-meaning relations, which cannot be explained as language contact phenomena. Other examples for iconicity in spoken language are ideophones, i.e. words which evoke sensory imagery, like English splish-splash or German holterdipolter. Furthermore, there are iconic prosodic modulations (Perniss & Vigliocco 2014). Here, prosodic features such as duration and fundamental frequency are modulated to express additional meaning components such as size and speed as in looooooooong (in written or spoken language) to iconically express extreme length/size/duration/... of the item under consideration. In sign languages, there is a long tradition for the investigation of the iconic aspects of these languages. Recently, also gestures in spoken languages and their iconic contributions have been investigated more systematically under formal semantic and pragmatic aspects (Ebert & Ebert 2014, Schlenker 2017).

In our workshop, we want to deal with all these different aspects of iconicity and pursue the following questions among others: in which contexts and why do we use iconic means in communication? Which pragmatic meaning and function do they have? What are language universals and what are language specific iconic means? Which prosodic, gestural, or written means are used to express iconicity? In this introduction session, we will introduce the main issues and questions that we are after and that will become relevant in the different contributions to this workshop.