A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

I
iamb (n.) A traditional term in metrics for a unit of poetic rhythm comprising
a single pair of unstressed + stressed syllables (as in believe); also called an
iambic foot. In metrical phonology, the notion is used as an informal name
for bounded right-dominant feet, which display this rhythmical structure.
See also trochee.
iambic reversal
see reversal
iconicity (n.) (1) A suggested defining property of some semiotic systems,
but not language, to refer to signals whose physical form closely corresponds
to characteristics of the situations to which they refer. This is the normal state
of affairs in animal communication, for example, where a call expressing fear
is used only in a fear-producing context. In language, only a small number of
items could be argued to possess such directly symbolic (iconic) properties, e.g.
onomatopoeic expressions such as cuckoo, growl.
(2) In linguistics, iconicity identifies the extent to which a relationship between
semantic notions is directly represented in a language’s formal expression.
For example, the semantic relation of a verb to its direct object (I see a cat) is
closer than that of a verb to its adverbial (I see a cat every evening), and in so
far as a language would reflect this difference in closeness formally (e.g. through
morphology or through word-order) one could talk of an iconic correspondence.
This pair of examples would support the notion, in that the normal
word-order is as given, and not *I see every evening a cat). Iconicity is especially
notable in morphology, where increased formal markedness typically corresponds
to increased semantic markedness.
idealization (n.) A term used in linguistics to refer to the degree to which
linguists ignore certain aspects of the variability in their raw data, in order to
arrive at an analysis that is as generally applicable as possible. Idealization is
a major assumption of generative linguistics, as it underlies the notion of
competence. A main aim of linguistics, in this view, is to account for the
language of an ideal (or idealized) speaker-hearer in an ideal (i.e. homogeneous)
speech community, who knows the language perfectly, and is unaffected by
memory limitations, distractions, errors, etc., in actually using the language.
A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics 6th Edition. David Crystal
© 2008 David Crystal. ISBN: 978-1-405-15296-9