It is also common to use reduplication to iconically mark increase, as Edward Sapir is quoted, “The process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance” (1921:79).
Iconic coding principles may be natural tendencies in language and are also part of our cognitive and biological make-up.
Onomatopoeia (and mimesis more broadly) may be seen as a kind of iconicity, though even onomatopoeic sounds have a large degree of arbitrariness.
Derek Bickerton has posited that iconic signs, both verbal and gestural, were crucial in the evolution of human language.
Insofar as these morphemes constitute a coherent pattern of relations which create a line of mentation, they form a diagrammatic icon".
Another example is “the relationship between great, greater, greatest….since the morphological pattern of adjective grading is the same as in loud, louder, loudest”.
[6] Iconic calls and gestures mimic the forms of the things they stand for (such as outlining shapes or moving your hands back and forth multiple times to show repetition).
Iconic calls and gestures are not formally considered language or language-like communication in that they do not contrast or possess arbitrary characteristics.
Burling et al. states: "Chimpanzees in the wild do not point, and rarely do so in captivity, however there is a documented case of one named Kanzi, described by Savage-Rumbaugh et al., who could indicate direction of travel by "extending his hand".
Some proponents believe that iconicity does not play an actual role in perception and production of signs once they have undergone phonological reduction and become part of the conventionalized vocabulary.
In American Sign language (ASL) a grammatical marker denoting “intensity” is characterized by a movement pattern with two parts: an initial pause, followed by a quick completion.
[9] The ASL marker for "intensity" is iconic in that the intended meaning (building of pressure, a sudden release) is matched by the articulatory form (a pause, a quick completion).
The reason for this also lies in the fact that it was, for a long time, assumed that it is a major property of natural languages that there is no relation between the surface form of a word and its potential referents (thus, there is no relationship between how the word computer is pronounced and what a computer, for example, looks like, see also arbitrariness).
[11] The idea that iconicity should not play a role in natural languages was, for example, stressed by Charles Hockett.
It was, however, later acknowledged that iconicity also plays a role in many spoken languages (see, for example Japanese sound symbolism).
The amount of time it takes to read "The Fish" coincides with the length of time a fish could live outside of water; likewise, the duration of the long bus ride in "The Moose" coincides with the poem's long first sentence as well as the twenty-some stanzas it takes before the passengers on the bus (and the reader) actually encounters the moose.
This is a toponymic rejective phono-semantic matching of Polish Radom, the name of a town in Poland (approximately 100 kilometres (62 mi) south of Warsaw), or of its Yiddish adaptation ródem (see Uriel Weinreich 1955: 609, Paul Wexler 1991: 42).
[17] A test run by Sapir asked subjects to differentiate between two different sized tables using invented word pairs such as "mal" and "mil".
Bentley and Varron (1933) ran tests asking subjects to differentiate between vowel sounds without providing them, beforehand, contrasting attributes (such as bright and dark.)