Iconic plurality across modalities

Abstract Iconicity permeates human language in all its modalities and can be employed to express a multitude of meanings. This chapter describes how iconicity can be used as a device to express plural meaning, in a broad sense, in spoken, signed, and gestured languaging. The perceived resemblance-mapping between plural form and plural meaning has long been acknowledged with respect to repetition and reduplication. In this chapter, a broader, cross-modal view is adopted, with which iconic expressions of plurality can be observed on many levels of linguistic structure—from texts and sentences down to words, phonemes, and phonetic features. Whereas some strategies are found across modalities (e.g. repetition and reduplication), others depend on the use of space and availability of multiple articulators and are thus mainly found as a strategy in signed and gestured languaging.