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

Abstract

The study of expressive language has helped illustrate how ideophonicity operates between grammar and performance, as both syntax and poetics, across a wide range of phenomena experienced by speakers. In the Bit language, spoken in Laos and China by approximately 2,400 people, there is a rich vocabulary of expressives, or ideophones, used to depict a lack of movement, action or agency. In doing so, Bit speakers define silence in terms of sound, stillness in terms of potential or past movement, and absence through the experience of expectation or habit. It is widely recognized that silence is not simply the lack of sound, but this analysis shows how culturally specific conceptions of the meaning of silence can be represented with the marked poetic language of expressives to account for the experience of various forms of absence. As such the analysis is an exploration of how ethnopoetics and semiotic ideology intersect in the production of Bit linguistic culture. [ethnopoetics, expressives, ideophones, semiotic ideology, silence]

The Mindful Animism of Ideophony in Pastaza and Upper Napo Kichwa

“…The existence of an ideophone for a “sound” of silence may seem paradoxical. However, such ideophones have been attested in numerous languages that communicate not only silence but related concepts of absence, loss, and cessation (Badenoch 2021, 12).…”