Iconicity as Recognizability

We expose a pragmatic view of the iconic sign, getting rid totally of the notion of reference. In communicative contexts (not in Arts), an iconic sign is useful as far as it succeeds in making a reader produce an expected interpretation. So, its essential feature has to reside in the recognizability of a conventional visual type. We illustrate how the visual type - being conventional - is dependent from the target readers population. We show examples of how significant visual features, defining a stereotypical visual sign for a given concept, may be found in corpora of spontaneous drawing productions. Samples are given from a population of 13/14 years old school children.

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