Frequency, variation, and iconicity

Abstract After reviewing the remarkable success that iconicity has had over the past two decades in establishing itself as a design feature of language, this chapter examines the relationship between iconicity and token frequency. It argues that high frequency has a surprisingly similar impact on the formal and semantic levels by giving rise to variation. This variation presents a challenge to one of the most general iconic effects—the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form. While some of the allolexic and all of the syntactic variation are compatible with the bi-uniqueness condition, polysemy and allomorphy are un-iconic in nature. Polysemy can be motivated by postulating a lower availability of form than of meaning. Allomorphy necessitates the claim that iconicity applies to lexical rather than grammatical meaning. It is concluded that high frequency constrains iconicity.