Structural markedness and depiction

Thompson, Arthur Lewis; Chan, May Pik Yu; Yeung, Ping Hei; Do, Youngah

doi:10.1075/ml.21016.tho

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery (Akita & Dingemanse, 2019). Ideophones stand out by being marked in terms of phonology (Nuckolls, Stanley, Nielsen, & Hopper 2016; Thompson & Do, 2019; Thompson, Chan, Yeung, & Do, 2022) as well as prosody (Mok, 2001; Thompson, 2018; Van Hoey & Thompson, 2020) and morphosyntax (Beck, 2008). They often feature iconic associations between form and meaning grounded in cross‐modal structural analogies (Akita & Dingemanse, 2019; Emmorey, 2014)—such as sibilant sounds like /ʃ/ being associated with scraping or roughness because fricative movements or contact with a rough texture often results in a sibilant noise (see Thompson, Van Hoey, & Do, 2021)—something that is enabled by their highly concrete and sensory meanings (McLean, 2020; Nuckolls, 2019; Van Hoey, in press).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Hoey

Thompson

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

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Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow‐up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound‐meaning associations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Hoey

Thompson

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

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Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal

Akinbo,

Bulkaam

2024

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.

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Structural markedness and depiction

Cited by 2 publications

References 49 publications

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal

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