Another stab at “meaning”: Concreteness, iconicity, and conventionality

Abstract
This study attempts a new approach to the problem of “meaning.” The authors are concerned primarily with meanings as they are encountered by decoders rather than as they are devised by encoders, and they focus almost exclusively on cognitive rather than on emotional aspects of meaning. A scheme comprising three dimensions—concreteness, iconicity, and conventionality—is proposed as a model for relating symbols to their concepts and their users. Emphasis is on ease or difficulty of decoding symbols in the cognitive realm. Experimentation is recommended for testing the hypotheses advanced in this approach.

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