Iconic strategies in lexical sensory signs in Finnish Sign Language

Abstract Iconic strategies—methods of making iconic forms—have been mostly considered in terms of concrete semantic fields such as actions and objects. In this article, I investigate iconic strategies in lexical sensory signs—signs that semantically relate to the five senses (sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste) and to emotions (e.g., anger)—in Finnish Sign Language. The iconic strategy types I discuss are hand-action, entity, drawing, and locating. I also discuss the indexical strategy type (e.g., finger pointing). To gain as rich and broad a view as possible, the mixed methods in the research consist of three components: intuition based, intersubjective, and statistical analyses. The main findings are (1) that, in order from most preferred to least preferred strategy, the hand-action, the entity, the indexical, and the drawing were found in lexical sensory signs; the locating strategy was not found at all, and (2) that the interpretation of iconic strategies is not always unambiguous and absolute. In conclusion, I reflect on methodological issues, and suggest that the concept of cross-modal iconicity and indexicality should be further studied in sign language linguistics.