Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu

Abstract

Ideophones are often described as words that are highly expressive and morphosyntactically marginal. A study of ideophones in everyday conversations in Siwu (Kwa, eastern Ghana) reveals a landscape of variation and change that sheds light on some larger questions in the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones. This article documents a trade-off between expressiveness and morphosyntactic integration, with high expressiveness linked to low integration and vice versa. It also describes a pathway for deideophonization and finds that frequency of use influences the degree to which ideophones can come to be more like ordinary words. The findings have implications for processes of (de) ideophonization, ideophone borrowing, and ideophone typology. A key point is that the internal diversity we find in naturally occurring data, far from being mere noise, is patterned variation that can help us to get a handle on the factors shaping ideophone systems within and across languages.

Language as Description, Indication, and Depiction

“…Signers exploit the iconic nature of signs in such ways as to manipulate meaning construction, and in doing so, they profile the dual function of many signs as descriptions and depictions (see also the sign RUN in the Norwegian Sign Language example in Figure 2 ; Johnston and Ferrara, 2012; Ferrara and Halvorsen, 2017). Comparable manipulations of iconic words have been observed in spoken languages (e.g., Dingemanse and Akita, 2016; Dingemanse, 2017a), which points to interesting similarities and differences between signed and spoken language ecologies.…”

“…Dingemanse (2011, 2014, 2017a) explains that ideophones are spoken words that depict sensory imagery, and which are more or less integrated with surrounding morphosyntax. Examples include the Japanese gorogoro “rolling” and kibikibi “energetic” (mentioned in Dingemanse, 2017b).…”

Chapter 1. ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

“…The earliest investigations of ideophone-like phenomena used a wide range of labels, from 'intensifying adverbs' and 'picture words' to 'onomatopoeic interjections' and 'radical descriptives' (Dingemanse 2018). Doke, a scholar working on the Bantu languages of Southern Africa, introduced the term 'ideophones' in a bid to do justice to the large grammatical category of items of this type encountered in just about any Bantu language (Doke 1935).…”

“…The reason this rarely works is threefold: (i) the number of possible iconic interpretations of any string of speech sounds is vast, (ii) the space of possible lexical meanings is orders of magnitude larger if not infinite, and (iii) both the form and meaning spaces are warped by language-specific properties (Bühler 1934;Werner and Kaplan 1963;Dingemanse 2018). Especially in languages with inventories of conventionalised ideophones that run into the thousands, there is no way that these words could simply present unmediated iconic associations (Güldemann 2008).…”

“…There are six common depictive mouth gestures in American Sign Language which can be overlaid on manual lexical signs to iconically signify broad aspectual meanings like ongoingness or unimpededness (Hogue 2011). But there are thousands of ideophones in spoken languages like Japanese, Korean, Basque, or Gbeya (Dingemanse 2018). The similarity in mode of signification notwithstanding, the linguistic status of these items appears to be fundamentally different in spoken and signed languages.…”