Wittgenstein: Iconicity In Language And «Experience Of Meaning» [Wittgenstein: Iconicidad En El Lenguaje Y «Experiencia Del Significado»]

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.