"Signed languages are full of iconic linguistic items: words, inflections, and even syntactic constructions with structural similarities between their physical form and their referents' form. Iconic items can have concrete meanings and also abstract meanings through conceptual metaphors.

Language from the Body relates iconicity and metaphor in a cognitivist framework, shows how iconic and metaphorical items are central to normal language use, and demonstrates that these items can only be understood properly through a cognitivist or related approach in which meaning can influence form."--BOOK JACKET.