Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

1. Despite its solid grounding in the field of semiotically oriented poetics and its recent surge in popularity thanks to cognitive linguistics, the category o f iconicity is not a hom ogeneous one and, in the literature on literature, en com passes a variety o f incom m ensurable areas of problems.1 In the m ost traditional and perhaps somewhat old-fashioned view, iconicity is equated with imagery and with the capacity that words have to form illustrative images that stimulate the sensibility of the receiver.2