Lexicography in-your-face: The active semantics of Pastaza Quichua ideophones

Abstract

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language's ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts of use. The major discovery revealed by studying these clips is that ideophones’ meanings can be clarified by means of a distinction found in modality and American Sign Language studies. This distinction between speaker-internal and speaker-external perspective is evident in the intonational and gestural details of ideophones’ use.

Revising an implicational hierarchy for the meanings of ideophones, with special reference to Japonic

“…With more researchers now tackling the difficult task of documenting ideophone meanings (e.g. De Schryver 2009;Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2019;Nuckolls et al 2017;Nuckolls 2019;Osada et al 2019;Rhee and Koo 2017), this is a promising avenue for future research. However, there are likely to be some challenges along the way, which I discuss in the next section.…”

A semantic map for ideophones

“…From these resources a trend emerges towards increasingly bigger databases with more multimodal information, in order to do the maximalist position justice. Some significant semantic studies include the adoption of image schemas (Nuckolls, 1996;Nuckolls et al, 2017, see also chapter 23), illustrated by the Pastaza Quechua ideophone polang (6), which can be glossed as either "glide across water" (6a) or "glide up to the surface of the water" (6b). Nuckolls et al discuss the importance of watching their informant depict this ideophone.…”

Silence, Cessation and Stasis: The Ethnopoetics of “Absence” in Bit Expressives

“…The details of expressive meaning have been recognized as being particularly tricky (for some of earlier discussion see Samarin, 1967;Diffloth 1972). Differing examples of usage may include contexts and situations that are not easy to link with a common semantic thread, as expressives are not referential nor defined by a unitary semantic essence (see for example Dingemanse 2012;Kita 1997;Nuckolls et al 2017). Expressives constitute an affecto-imagistic domain of meaning in the language (Kita 1997).…”