Cognizione lessicale e grammatica: dati dal cinese

Lexical Cognition and Grammar: data from Chinese. Although a defining characteristic of language is arbitrariness, nevertheless some grammatical structures in some languages prove to be iconic. In such cases, the relationships between signs reflect the relationships between referents, revealing the often underestimated role of semantics in the structuration of grammar. Different kinds of diagrammatic iconicity will be exemplified with data from Chinese, with particular reference to the organization of partsof-speech. Iconicity can indeed surface as: isomorphism, i.e. one-to-one correspondence between sign and referent; morphological markedness which characterize non-prototypical combinations of form and meaning; formal identity bearing witness of functional identity; formal identity bearing witness of conceptual contiguity.