The aesthetic motivation of icons

Abstract Linguistic structures may be iconically and aesthetically motivated. Iconically motivated structures depict and are thus tethered to reality, but aesthetically motivated structures are created for their own sake. An aesthetic motivation is uncontested in music and poetry, but that it could even exist in unplanned discourse is still a novelty in linguistics. This chapter makes the case for contrasting aesthetic and iconic motivations for symmetrical structures in Cambodian, a typical Southeast Asian language where both kinds of motivation are well attested. Moreover, what underlies the iconic urge to depict is the same as what underlies the aesthetic urge in poetry and music: an artistic satisfaction in creating and contemplating likenesses. In iconic depiction, a likeness is created between a thing in the world and its representation. In more abstract art forms the parallelism is between a model and its repetition within the artwork itself.