Syntactic iconicity and linguistic freezes

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This work explores the concept of syntactic iconicity across various domains, including language, literature, psychology, and philosophy. It begins with an examination of iconicity in Modern German serialization rules, followed by discussions on markedness, processing constraints, and coding possibilities. Contributions address language-internal iconicity, semantic constraints on phonologically independent freezes, and categories of word order iconicity. The role of deixis and the implications of "dative shift" in English are also analyzed, alongside the iconicity of focus in Modern Hebrew and its relevance to morphology. In literature, the text investigates textual iconicity in Russian literature and the iconicity of metaphor and expressive syntactic transformations. Psychology sections delve into the motor theory of language, the psychological basis of syntactic iconicity, and the relationship between language and motor action. Evidence from both signing and nonsigning children is presented, along with discussions on the preservation of syntactic icons in Alzheimer's disease and aphasia. Philosophically, the work examines the connection between syntactic iconicity and connectionist models of language and cognition, as well as the role of pragmatics. The annotation concludes with comprehensive indexes of subjects and names, encapsulating the multifaceted exploration of iconicity in language and its broader implications.