Abstract
The paper is premised on the assumption of a radical gradualism in the emergence of language in opposition to catastrophe theories advocating its sudden birth. On this hypothesis, the paper argues against the view that the evolution of language has meant a loss of iconicity. Instead, I claim that while iconicity has been eliminated from the arbitrary signifier it has been retained and refined at the level of the motivated signified. In support of this claim I place imaginability at the hub of language, as the human capacity for the mental variation of perception and an indispensable component of the linguistic sign. The main vehicles of iconicity are shown to be aboutness and voice, with protosyntax functioning as a forerunner to linguistic syntax. Only once we acknowledge that language is not a symbolic system but rather a heterosemiotic hybrid, with a capacity to accommodate symbolicity, the paper concludes, will we be in a position to do justice to the emergence of language from its nonverbal precursors. © 2016, Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations.