It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule have divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures.

中文翻译：

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标志性的象征谱

区分两大代表家族是很常见的。符号表示包括逻辑和数学符号、单词和复杂的语言表达。标志性表现形式包括表盘、图表、地图、图片、3 维模型和描绘手势。本文描述并激发了一种区分图像和符号表征的新方法。它所定位的差异不在于符号本身，也不在于它们所表达的内容，而在于符号与内容相关联的语义规则。这两种规则具有不同的形式，在自然性谱上占据相反的两极。符号规则完全由符号类型与内容的原始并置组成，而象标规则则完全由符号类型之间统一的自然关系决定内容。这种区别在熟悉的符号系统的形式语义中得到了明确的标记，无论是对于原子一阶表示，如单词、像素颜色和刻度盘，还是对于复杂的二阶表示，如句子、图表和图片。