Where frozen signs reclaim iconic ground

Sign Languages provide ways to create iconically motivated signs, that is, signs whose meaning is directly or indirectly connected to an underlying mental image expressed by the depictive elements of the sign’s form. While signs can be created and used to depict and therefore show what is meant, not all iconically motivated signs are used in this way. Signs of the established lexicon have meanings that are fixed by convention, although their form may be iconically motivated. In signing discourse established signs are used to denote objects, persons, situations or actions (function of ‘telling’). Once the context has thus been clarified iconic signs can be used in the function of ‘showing’. For this purpose, signers often create new, context-fitting iconic signs (‘productive signs’). However, iconically motivated established signs can also be used for showing by re-activating their underlying image and modifying their form. When analyzing data it sometimes is difficult to decide whether the sign should be classified as a modified established sign (‘iconic modification’) or as a productive sign. This decision is relevant for annotation (token-type-matching) as well as for the corpus-based lexicographic description of a sign’s usage. In this paper we discuss sequences of a telling sign followed by a showing sign found in the DGS Corpus. We suggest some criteria for the classification and explain where we would draw the line between iconic modification and productive signs.