Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe

2015

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.

Section: A Simple Heuristic For Interpreting Repeated Talksupporting

confidence: 56%

Ideophones and reduplication

2015

“…It is used in descriptions of languages around the world, from Awetí, Basque and Chintang to Xhosa, Yir-Yoront and Zuni (Alpher 1994;Gxowa 1994;Tedlock 1999;Rai et al 2005;Reiter 2012;Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017). The alternative labels 'expressives' and 'mimetics' continue to be current in the prolific research traditions of South-East Asian and Japanese linguistics (e.g., Diffloth 2001;Iwasaki et al 2017), but there seems to be broad agreement that these point to essentially the same phenomenon, with expected language-specific and areal nuances (Akita 2015;Armoskaite and Koskinen 2017). Other terms occasionally used in cross-linguistic studies of the phenomenon are 'sound-symbolic words' or 'iconic words', but for reasons clarified below, I think these do not cover quite the same ground.…”

Section: Five Key Properties Of Ideophonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chapter 1. ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives

2019

This chapter makes the case for 'ideophone' as a comparative concept: a notion that captures a recurrent typological pattern and provides a template for understanding language-specific phenomena that prove similar. It revises an earlier definition to account for the observation that ideophones typically form an open lexical class, and uses insights from canonical typology to explore the larger typological space. According to the resulting definition, a canonical ideophone is a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery. The five elements of this definition can be seen as dimensions that together generate a possibility space to characterise cross-linguistic diversity in depictive means of expression. This approach allows for the systematic comparative treatment of ideophones and ideophone-like phenomena. Some phenomena in the larger typological space are discussed to demonstrate the utility of the approach: phonaesthemes in European languages, specialised semantic classes in West-Chadic, diachronic diversions in Aslian, and depicting constructions in signed languages.

“…One could say that there has been a preoccupation with form not function. Yet in order to develop a complete understanding of ideophones, we need to take into account their rich sensory meanings, their interactional uses, and their place in the wider linguistic and cultural ecology (Ameka 2001; Childs 2001; Newman 2001). Ideophone research has much to gain from such diverse fields of inquiry as semiotics, psycholinguistics, semantic typology, corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and the ethnography of speaking.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in the Cross‐Linguistic Study of Ideophones

Language and Linguist. Compass

2012

301

247

Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery found in many of the world's languages. They are noted for their special forms, distinct grammatical behaviour, rich sensory meanings, and interactional uses related to experience and evidentiality. This review surveys recent developments in ideophone research. Work on the semiotics of ideophones helps explain why they are marked and how they realise the depictive potential of speech. A true semantic typology of ideophone systems is coming within reach through a combination of language-internal analyses and language-independent elicitation tools. Documentation of ideophones in a wide variety of genres as well as sequential analysis of ideophone use in natural discourse leads to new insights about their interactional uses and about their relation to other linguistic devices like reported speech and grammatical evidentials. As the study of ideophones is coming of age, it sheds new light on what is possible and probable in human language.