Yonatan Ratosh, a renowned Hebrew poet, made his living as a translator. His translations and lists found in his lexical legacy, contain thousands of his suggestions for new Hebrew terms. Among them many instances stand out that manifest some sort of similarity between the concept and the term proposed by Ratosh, thus raising the issue of iconicity. This paper takes a closer look at these instances, integrating theoretical aspects of iconicity and issues concerning lexicon in general, and Ratosh’s means of (...) lexical innovations in particular. Specifically, we first look at image and diagram. We then move beyond the dyad to consider metaphor. After that discussion we point out the asymmetry caused by omitting folk etymology, metonymy, and ellipsis. We propose, then, that semiotics should restrict iconicity only to intrinsic relations within the sign itself, hence image and diagram, thus not contaminating iconicity with cases of secondness, thirdness, or endless conventionalism. (shrink)

For a sign to be a sign it must bond an object, a signifier, and the idea to which it gives rise. The paper focuses on the iconicity of silence as a hypoiconic signifier, exploring the semiotics of silence in light of the notions and studies of iconicity. Fascinating parallelisms hold between iconicity and silence. These raise many challenges to the study of each separately, let alone dealing with them jointly. Some icons and some silences are qualities in the real (...) world, others are semiotic forms standing for or denoting objects. Simple, intuitive qualities of iconicity and of silence are naturally grasped and shared from antiquity to the present by cultures and peoples. The paper employs Peirce’s initial basic trichotomy of iconic classes as well as his later hierarchies for studying the iconic stance of silence as a hypoiconic signifier. Analyzing and illustrating the possible complexities between forms, contents, their relations and their interpretations, group hypoiconic silences into silence as an image, silence as a diagram, and silence as a metaphor. (shrink)