Iconicity in instructional texts

Iconicity in instructional texts

Blog Article

Diagrammatic iconicity is usually investigated at the surface syntactic level of texts.In this paper, I try to show that a meaningful concept of iconicity cannot be found on this level in non-trivial instructional texts.Instead, we have to dive deeper into semantic and conceptual structure.I present Pumps Air a model of Conceptual Structure that can cope with the demands that understanding an instructional text puts on the reader, and after analyzing a concrete text (a cooking Round End Table recipe), I show that the concept of control structure is of essential importance for the description of the mapping between a conceptual model and a text.

Control structures can be expressed explicitly through linguistic means or be inherent to the semantics of lexical predicates.In both cases, the presence of a dynamic conceptual model is necessary in order to establish iconicity relations between the text and the underlying mental representation.