This volume offers a selection of papers on iconicity in language and literature. They deal with semiotic, linguistic and literary theory but also case studies of how iconicity works on all levels of language (phonetic, graphemic, syntactic, and lexical).

1. Acknowledgements; 2. List of contributors; 3. Introduction: Veni, Vidi, Vici (by Nanny, Max); 4. Part I: General; 5. Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature (by Noth, Winfried); 6. The semiotics of the Mise-en-Abyme (by White, John J.); 7. Good probes: Icons, anaphors, and the evolution of language (by Herlofsky, William J.); 8. Part II: Sounds and beyond; 9. The sound as an echo to the sense: The iconicity of English gl- words (by Sadowski, Piotr); 10. On natural motivation in metaphors: The case of the cucurbits (by Norrman, Ralf); 11. Old English poetic texts and their Latin sources: Iconicity in Caedmon's Hymn and The Phoenix (by Anderson, Earl R.); 12. Part III: Visual iconicity: Writing, typography and the use of images; 13. Iconic punctuation: Ellipsis marks in a historical perspective (by Henry, Anne C.); 14. Iconic functions of long and short lines (by Nanny, Max); 15. Iconicity in advertising signs: Motive and method in miming 'the body' (by Goh, Robbie B.H.); 16. Iconoclasm and iconicity in seventeenth-century English poetry (by Innocenti, Loretta); 17. Part IV: Iconicity in grammatical structures; 18. Structural iconicity: The English -S- and OF-genitives (by Conradie, C. Jac); 19. The position of the adjective in (Old) English from an iconic perspective (by Fischer, Olga); 20. Present participles as iconic expressions (by Jansen, Frank); 21. Of Markov chains and upholstery buttons: "Moi, madame, votre chien..." (by Lecercle, Jean-Jacques); 22. Part V: Iconicity in textual structures; 23. Iconicity and rhetoric: A note on the iconic force of rhetorical figures in Shakespeare (by Muller, Wolfgang G.); 24. The emergence of experiential iconicity and spatial perspective in landscape descriptions in English fiction (by Wolf, Werner); 25. Iconic dimensions in Margaret Atwood's poetry and prose (by Ljungberg, Christina); 26. Author index; 27. Subject index

The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2 is a definite success for the researchers in language iconicity. It should also prove extremely useful to poetics researchers looking for the definition and properties of literariness in language. To all other linguists and literature students and researchers it is an open window to each other's field and to motivated sign theory.