Are ideophones really as weird and extra-systematic as linguists make them out to be?

Newman, Paul

doi:10.1075/tsl.44.20new

Cited by 42 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…When Owen Emeric Vidal first came across ideophones in Yoruba, he declared them to be a "singularly unique feature" of the language, and confidently announced, "therefore I shall not waste time in comparing it with the adverbial systems, whatever they may be, of other African languages" (Vidal 1852: 17). This statement would prove to be fantastically wrong, yet ideophone exceptionalism remained an alluring perspective until recently (Newman 2001). An example is a study of English ideophones billing itself as "explorations in the lunatic fringe of language" (Frankis 1991), reinforcing the supposedly marginal nature of the phenomenon under study.…”

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confidence: 99%

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Dingemanse

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics, and including onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in general linguistics and typology around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalisation, work on ideophones has made an impact in many areas of linguistics, from theories of phonological features to typologies of manner and motion, and from sound symbolism to sensory language. Due to their hybrid nature as gradient vocal gestures that grow roots in discrete linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesises past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.

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confidence: 99%

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Dingemanse

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…examples cited in Newman 2001). In this paper I have shown some of the things we gain by including them.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…None of this should be surprising to typologists, who are used to seeing similar relations between better studied word classes like nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Dryer 1997;Croft & van Lier 2012). What it shows is that ideophones, although words of a distinct kind, are not incommensurable with other types of words (Newman 2001). There are productive morphological derivational relations in multiple directions, often involving reduplication or repetition.…”

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confidence: 99%

Ideophones and reduplication

Dingemanse

2015

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Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk with special reference to ideophones. To understand these phenomena, it is useful to distinguish two modes of representation in language -description and depiction -along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that help steer listener's interpretations from one to the other. Reduplication can partake in both modes, which is why it is common in ideophones and other areas of grammar. Using evidence from a range of languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk, and argues that both description and depiction are fundamental to understanding how language works.

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“…Despite the fact that mimetics sound "unambiguously mimetic" to native Japanese speakers (Hamano 1998:219;Tamori and Schourup 1999:6), definition of mimetics has been one of the biggest puzzles in mimetic studies (for similar puzzles in other languages see Abelin 1999;Wiltshire 1999;Newman 2001). Hamano (1998:6-7) discusses this difficulty from four aspects.…”

Section: Morphophonological Definition Of Mimeticsmentioning

confidence: 99%