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Survey of Bantu ideophones
... Another significant contribution of the present study is related to the recurrent theme that ideophones are antipathic to inflectional and derivational affixes (Dingemanse to appear). As most reported cases of derivational affixes targeting ideophones are from Bantu languages (Samarin 1971, Shangase 2001, the irregular marker in Naijá contributes to the typology of ideophones that are integrated into derivational morphology. The motivation for disharmony, such as the polar-tone melody of the irregular marker, is typically attributed to perceptual enhancement or the distinctive identification of adjacent linguistic elements (Boersma 1998). ...
... The attachment of derivational (or inflectional) affixes to ideophones is rare across languages. Most of the documented cases are from Bantu languages (Samarin 1971, Shangase 2001. Even in such cases, the derivational affixes are segments. ...
... In this case, the occurrence of ideophones in predicate structures and their capability as stems of inflectional and/or derivational affixes are considered their final stage of grammaticalisation (Heine & Kouteva 2002, Heine 2017, Andrason & Heine 2023, Heine 2023. Crucially, evidence for the involvement of ideophones in derivational morphology mostly comes from Bantu languages (Samarin 1971, Tassa 2001. The fact that the irregular marker can have ideophones as its base of derivation suggests that ideophones are also grammatically integrated in Naijá. ...
This work focuses on a pattern of tonal alternation that is intertwined with a pattern of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin. In the language, verbs are reduplicated to iconically express iteration. To convey that the iterated event occurs in an irregular or dispersive manner, the verb bears a low tone (L) on all its tone-bearing units (TBU), while the reduplicant bears a high tone (H) on all its TBUs. The resulting L-H tonal melody is considered the exponent of an irregular marker, while the intertwined reduplication is considered the exponent of an iteration marker. Due to the similarity between the exponent of the irregular marker and the iconic tonal melody of ideophones that express the semantic notions of irregularity across languages, the form-meaning mapping of the irregular marker is regarded as a grammaticalised form of the tone melody in the substrate ideophones. This suggests that ideophones can contribute to the emergence and expansion of grammar, as well as the typology of grammatical tone. Considering that perceptual resemblance between linguistic structures and the structural components of real-world elements is the basis of iconicity, the pattern of tonal alternation in Nigerian Pidgin suggests that the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory is not purely phonetic and phonological but also includes the crossmodal perception of sensory imagery.
... Phonologically, ideophones in some languages exhibit phonemic and, more commonly, phonotactic exceptionality (Samarin 1971;Childs 1994;Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001). For example, in Hausa, word-medial short /e/ and /o/ are only found in ideophones, as in fés 'very clean' and sól 'emphasizes whiteness' (Newman 2001: 253). ...
... These phonological properties make mimetics somewhat different from non-mimetic native words, but not as different as loanwords. 5 Morphologically, reduplication is a notable feature of ideophones in many languages (Samarin 1971;Hinton et al. 1994). Reduplicated ideophones are iconically associated with some aspectual or other semantic features, such as repetition, plurality, and emphasis. ...
... kirakira-da 'be glittery,' gaQkari-da 'be disappointed'). These facts lead us to conclude that Japanese mimetics may form a lexical stratum but not a coherent syntactic class (for related debates, see Newman 1968;Samarin 1971;Bartens 2000;Sells, this volume). In particular, the rarity of sentence-edge uses and the prevalence of predicative uses suggest that Japanese mimetics are more deeply integrated into the grammatical system than ideophones in some other languages (Dingemanse, to appear). ...
... An objective assessment of Saussure's position strongly depends on how broadly onomatopoeia is defined, as already indicated in the Introduction. In principle, the problem concerning the number of onomatopoeia from a cross-linguistic point of view faces the obstacle of its unequal comprehension, ranging from direct sound imitation, through secondary onomatopoeia (onomatopoeia-based derivatives or semantically shifted words), to subsuming these words under ideophones (Akita 2009;Alpher 2001;Andrason 2020;Childs 1988;Creissels 2001;Dingemanse 2011Dingemanse , 2023Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017;Kießling 2024;Nuckolls 2001;Samarin 1971; van Hoey 2019; and many others), interjections (Bednall 2024;Benczes 2019;Brown 2024;Cuenca 2000;Ondruš and Sabol 1987;Swiatkowska 2006;Vassileva 2007;etc.), or other word-classes. ...
... The fallacy of criticizing Saussure's claim of the small number of onomatopoeia relative to the fully arbitrary part of the word-stock can be illustrated by Nuckolls' (1996) criticism, supported by the data from Diffloth (1976) and Samarin (1971). The problem with her argumentation is that Diffloth's study of the Semai language not only deals with onomatopoeia as direct imitations of sound events but also encompasses expressives in general. ...
In recent years, numerous publications on onomatopoeia have discussed this class of words either separately or as a part of a broader class of ideophones. Those focused on onomatopoeia usually provide a language-specific description primarily based on phonological, morphological and/or syntactic characteristics. Semiotically oriented papers generally discuss the nature of onomatopoeia against the background of Saussure’s conception of arbitrariness. What is missing is the representation of onomatopoeia in the main semiotic models. Therefore, this paper outlines the fundamental semiotic models and adapts them to capture the class of onomatopoeia. The paper covers Saussure’s dyadic model of linguistic sign, the triadic models of Peirce and Ogden and Richards, and a cognitive onomasiological model proposed by Horecký. The latter’s advantage is that it is a dynamic model with potential for adaptation to various word-formation processes, including onomatopoeia-formation.
... Linking ideophones' semantics with gesture is not in itself novel. Linguists have known for some time that ideophones have a close relationship with gesture (Dingemanse, 2012;Kita, 1997;Klassen, 1998;Kunene, 2001;Nuckolls, 2000;Reiter, 2013;Samarin, 1971). Not much attention, however, has been given to the variable types of gestures co-occurring with ideophones, although the significance of iconic gestures for ideophones within narrative, has been noted (Dingemanse, 2013;Dingemanse & Akita, 2017). ...
... Building on an established body of research on ideophones and their gestures (Dingemanse, 2012;Kita, 1993Kita, , 1997Klassen, 1998;Kunene, 2001;Reiter, 2013;Samarin, 1971), this paper has found that iconic gestures can be more finely differentiated in ways that clarify the sensori-semantics of ideophones. The specific findings of this paper, then, are that ideophones depictive of visual perceptions exhibit a strong propensity for bounding gestures. ...
Using data from the Northern Pastaza (qvc) and Upper Napo Quichua (quw) dialects of Amazonian Ecuador, this paper argues that the semantics of ideophones, a highly marked form class of expressive words, is principled and describable with a combination of sensori-semantic features and a fine-grained typology of gestures, based on insights from Streeck (2008) and others. Specifically, ideophones’ sensori-semantics are broken down into a semantic map consisting of 3 super- and 7 subcategorical distinctions. The greater the number of categories encoded by an ideophone’s semantics, the greater are the range of gestures used. Finally, gesture types identified by Streeck (2008) and others, were found among a very different group of people who are not western, educated, industrialized, rich, or democratic. Further research into ideophones and their gestures may find broader significance for ideophone semantics, and more generally, for the interrelations between language and gesture.
... ), all of which conform to language-specific (supra)segmental patterns that demarcate them from the rest of the lexicon ( Akita et al., 2013 ;Lai, 2015;Li, 2007;Thompson, 2018;Thompson and Do, 2019 ). English, according to many ( Doke, 1954;Childs, 1988;Haiman, 2018;Samarin, 1965Samarin, , 1971, has been dubbed a language decidedly deficient in ideophones when compared with other languages. English does have ideophones but they are mostly skewed towards the left-hand side of Dingemanse's implicational hierarchy (2012: 663), i.e., categories of sound and movement (as argued by Van Hoey, 2016 , c.f. English "onomatopoeia " dictionaries: Taylor, 2018;Fang, 2009 ). ...
... Generally speaking, demonstrations behave like ideophones: (1) they are adverbial, (2) marked, and (3) depictive. While English ideophones do not go far beyond semantic categories of sound and motion ( Van Hoey, 2016, c.f. Doke, 1954Childs, 1988;Haiman, 2018;Samarin, 1965Samarin, , 1971 for ideophone deficiency in English), this does not mean that English is somehow deficient in linguistic iconicity. Moreover, although some demonstrations are made up of unconventional components, as a whole they are still conventionalized due to their hierarchical composition (cf. ...
Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do speakers of a language with limited semantic categories of ideophones de- pict percepts? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, a language with arguably restricted sets of ideophones, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations in English with features from Güldemann’s (2008) observations: enacted verbal behaviour, non-linguistic vocal imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engag- ing in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken commu- nication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audio–visual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can’t go over the ocean! ) is in a demonstration, then it is vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstra- tions uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) are in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depends on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the wellformedness of demonstrations. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable.
... Relatively rare in Indo-European languages, they are numerous and frequent in many languages without writing (Amerindian, African, Australian languages, etc.) as well as in the oral or poetic varieties of several literary languages (Japanese, Turkish, Korean, etc.), where they generally play a role of adjectives or adverbs. The works of Bernhard Schlegel (1857), Harry Peck (1886), William Aston (1894), Diedrich Westermann (1907) and Louis Hjelmslev (1928: 171-189) contain the first scientific descriptions of ideophony, before Clement Doke (1935) defined and popularized the term, and the field matured with the syntheses of William Samarin (1965Samarin ( , 1971, Gerard Diffloth (1972), George Childs (1994) and Shoko Hamano (1998), then with the great collective works published by Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz (2001) and, more recently, by Kimi Akita and Prashant Pardeshi (2019). Today, among the most active researchers we can mention at least Mark Dingemanse (2011Dingemanse ( , 2012Dingemanse ( , 2018 for African studies and Kimi Akita (2009,2011,2012) for Japanese. ...
After recalling the main empirical evidence in favour of sound symbolism, this Introduction presents the contributions offered by the authors of this issue of Signifiances (Signifying). It then addresses some of the epistemological and metaphysical issues that a full integration of sound symbolism into language theory entails, particularly concerning the relationship between language and reality, and between nature and culture. Finally, it proposes to explain the centuries-old preference of scholars for the arbitrariness of the sign as an effect of the pre-eminent role that writing on paper has played in their pragmatic-cognitive experience of language up to the digital revolution.
... The works of Kornilov (1978) on the Chuvash language and Khusainov (1988) on the Kazakh language can be moted. Many languages of the world (for example, languages of South-East Asia (Kita, 1997), several African languages (Childs, 1994;Samarin, 1971), Australian Aboriginal languages (Alpher, 1994), etc. (see 2014;Blasi et al., 2016;Johansson, Anikin, Aseyev, 2019)) have many sound-symbolic words in the Turkic languages (Kornilov, 1978;Khusainov, 1988). Therefore, we believe that sound symbolism is one of the most important and exciting topics for modern Turkology. ...
... 4. the role of the Xhosa conjoint/disjoint alternation 8. A role similar to that of resultative particles might be played by certain ideophones; see Samarin (1971) on ideophones in Bantu. ...
This paper describes an exploratory approach to two related aspectual
phenomena, non-culminating accomplishments and non-culminating
construals of implied-result verbs, in the Bantu languages Xhosa and
Nyakyusa. While documented for a diverse array of languages, leading to
the identification of some cross-linguistic commonalities and axes of
variation, these phenomena have so far not been studied for any continental
African language. Both Xhosa and Nyakyusa license non-culminating
accomplishments but differ regarding the felicity of such construals with
different sub-types of accomplishments in relation to event progress, a
decisive factor being that Nyakyusa possesses verbal partitive morphology.
Concerning the non-culmination of implied-result verbs, both languages
show such readings and support prior cross-linguistic findings that zero
change readings are more readily available with agentive subjects. The data
further point to the potential role of causative morphology as a parameter of
variation to be considered in further comparative research on these verbs.
... Relativement rares dans les langues indo-européennes, ils sont utilisés par centaines dans beaucoup de langues sans écriture (amérindiennes, africaines, australiennes, etc.) ou dans les variétés orales ou poétiques de plusieurs langues littéraires (japonais, turc, coréen, etc.), principalement en fonction d'adjectifs ou d'adverbes. Les travaux de Bernhard Schlegel (1857), Harry Peck (1886), William Aston (1894), Diedrich Westermann (1907) et Louis Hjelmslev (1928 contiennent les premières descriptions scientifiques de l'idéophonie, avant que Clement Doke (1935) ne définisse et vulgarise le terme, et que le domaine ne parvienne à maturité avec les synthèses de William Samarin (1965Samarin ( , 1971, Gérard Diffloth (1972), George Childs (1994) et Shoko Hamano (1998 Dingemanse (2011Dingemanse ( , 2012Dingemanse ( , 2018 pour les études africaines et Kimi Akita (2009,2011,2012) pour le japonais. ...
After recalling the main empirical evidence in favour of sound symbolism, this Introduction presents the contributions offered by the authors of this issue of Signifiances (Signifying). It then addresses some of the epistemological and metaphysical issues that a full integration of sound symbolism into language theory entails, particularly concerning the relationship between language and reality, and between nature and culture. Finally, it proposes to explain the centuries-old preference of scholars for the arbitrariness of the sign as an effect of the pre-eminent role that writing on paper has played in their pragmatic-cognitive experience of language up to the digital revolution.
... •African languages systematically and extensively utilize ideophones (Samarin 1971;Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001 and works therein;Frajzyngier, p.c.). •Native American languages, Asian languages, Australian languages also have rich ideophone systems (works in Hinton et al. 1994, Bodomo 2006. ...
... •African languages systematically and extensively utilize ideophones (Samarin 1971;Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001 and works therein;Frajzyngier, p.c.). •Native American languages, Asian languages, Australian languages also have rich ideophone systems (works in Hinton et al. 1994, Bodomo 2006). ...
... Entre elas, destacam-se a redução relativa a distincões de número e ao emprego de ideofones. Esses de uso geral nas I ínguas bantos, podem ser descritos como formas de substituicão para exprimir certos sentidos de uma maneira diferente dos da linguagem corrente, um tanto próxima das onomatopéias no que diz respeito ao aspecto fônico, mas que exprimem idéias bem delimitadas, como as outras categorias de palavras, e não simples imitacões de ruídos (12). Quanto ao vocabulário, observa-se a ocorrência frequente de étimos bantos (Cf. ...
... Dingemanse (2012) concurs with scholars such as Diffloth (1972) and Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz (2001) who have claimed ideophony to be a universal -or near-universal -feature of human language, and with Liberman (1975) and Nuckolls (2004) who endorse the position that not all languages manifest it to the same extent. Samarin (1971) contends that: ...
The meaning of words comes into play when words as units of translation are to be translated from one language into another. Lexical items that are extant in one language but not in others pose enormous problems for translators. The translation of ideophones – which feature very prominently in African discourse – is a case in point in this article. Translators faced with the translation of such forms are required to come up with strategies to aptly express their meanings in the target text. This article seeks to establish how CSZ Ntuli, in his English translation of an isiZulu short story Uthingo Lwenkosazana by DBZ Ntuli, has translated some of the ideophones used by the original author. Translation strategies used by CSZ Ntuli in his translation to express the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones will be brought to light in this article. It will be confirmed that CSZ Ntuli, using different lexical forms in the target language, has effectively changed unfamiliar isiZulu cultural notions to concepts that the English target reader can relate to. It will also be shown that the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones can be expressed in the target language using approximation and amplification as translation strategies provided that the translator has a good command of both source and target languages. The discussion will also look at how various translation scholars view the notion of equivalence at word level, and research on ideophones in isiZulu will also be reviewed.
... (Bhatt & Lindlar 1998: 56) ["Standard" German: 'ja und dann ging das "kladderadatsch", Hecke auf, Klaus rein, Hecke zu, Auto fort') A second lexical category which is usually ignored in typological discussions of parts of speech, but which lends itself to a comparison with UVs in ATV languages, is that of ideophones. Although ideophones have been described for a large number of languages, for some of them as an open, major part of speech (Samarin 1971;Kulemeka 1995;Nuckolls 1996), there exists no clear, universally applicable definition. Some recurring components of definitions provided in the literature are the sound-symbolic nature of ideophones, their special segmental and/or prosodic properties, and their association with performative foregrounding / expressive prosody (see e.g. the contributions in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz (eds) (2001)). ...
This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology.
... Criterion 2: Reduplicative form covers many parts of speech > few Cross-linguistically, sound-symbolic lexicon is less syntactically constrained than prosaic lexicon (Newman 1968;Samarin 1971;Bartens 2000) and Japanese mimetics are not an exception: they can appear across four regular grammatical categories of adverb, (complex) verb, adjective (or nominal-adjective), and noun stems (Akita 2009: 48). To reflect this fact, criterion 2 states that, if an individual reduplicative form covers many parts of speech in the mimetic lexicon, this is more canonical than if it covers few. ...
Cross-linguistically, reduplication associated with iconic readings, such as plurality, iteration, and continuation, is prevalent in ideophones. However, not all reduplicative processes in ideophones are clearly iconic. Notably, both less and more iconic uses of reduplication are encountered in ordinary vocabulary resulting in the overlapping semantic functions of reduplication between ideophonic and non-ideophonic (i.e., prosaic) lexical categories. Given this, the aim of this paper is not to establish one clear-cut point to distinguish ideophonic reduplication from prosaic reduplication that may be impossible, but to specify dimensions of possibilities along which several instances of ideophonic and prosaic reduplication can be calibrated, using Canonical Typology (Corbett). The current paper adopts the canonical approach of typology in an innovative way – not to compare a reduplicative phenomenon across languages (classic " typology "), but within a language by drawing ideophonic and prosaic data from Japanese, which is rich in reduplication and ideophones. Measuring the canonicity values of the various occurring types of ideophonic and prosaic reduplication against six criteria for canonical ideophonic reduplication, this paper shows how many and what criteria can differentiate the two sets of phenomena. Consequently, it reveals how ideophonic and prosaic reduplication are alike or different from each other. It also demonstrates the utility of Localized Canonical Typology, for the precise description and analysis of complex categories in a single language.
... In another review of the Bantu literature, Samarin (1971), summarized in Weakley (1973: 7), collected the following 'characteristics' of ideophones: So far, the focus has been on semantic (and pragmatic) aspects of ideophones -a logical by-product of looking at dictionary definitions. Even more striking, however, are the unique phonological, morphological and syntactic aspects of ideophones -all of which have received considerable attention in the scientific literature. ...
The ideophone, a word class not unique to but highly characteristic of the Bantu languages, presents particular challenges in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Not only is this part of speech without a counterpart in most other languages, the meaning of ideo-phones is highly elusive. In this research article these challenges are studied by means of an analy-sis of the treatment of ideophones in a corpus-driven Zulu–English school dictionary project.
Keywords: lexicography, dictionary, bilingual, corpus, frequency, bantu, zulu (isizulu), english, ideophone, semantic import, paraphrase, part-of-speech mismatch
... In another review of the Bantu literature, Samarin (1971), summarized in Weakley (1973, collected the following 'characteristics' of ideophones: So far, the focus has been on semantic (and pragmatic) aspects of ideophones -a logical by-product of looking at dictionary definitions. Even more striking, however, are the unique phonological, morphological and syntactic aspects of ideophones -all of which have received considerable attention in the scientific literature. ...
p>Abstract: The ideophone, a word class not unique to but highly characteristic of the Bantu languages, presents particular challenges in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Not only is this part of speech without a counterpart in most other languages, the meaning of ideophones is highly elusive. In this research article these challenges are studied by means of an analysis of the treatment of ideophones in a corpus-driven Zulu–English school dictionary project.
Keywords: LEXICOGRAPHY, DICTIONARY, BILINGUAL, CORPUS, FREQUENCY, BANTU, ZULU (ISIZULU), ENGLISH, IDEOPHONE, SEMANTIC IMPORT, PARAPHRASE, PART-OF-SPEECH MISMATCH
Samenvatting: De lexicografische behandeling van ideofonen in Zoeloe. De ideofoon, een woordklasse die niet uniek maar wel heel karakteristiek is voor de Bantoetalen, is een echte uitdaging in zowel de monolinguale als bilinguale lexicografie. Niet enkel heeft deze woordklasse geen equivalent in de meeste andere talen, de betekenis van ideofonen is heel moeilijk vast te leggen. In dit onderzoeksartikel worden deze uitdagingen onderzocht aan de hand van een analyse van de behandeling van ideofonen in een corpus-gedreven Zoeloe–Engels schoolwoorden-boekproject.
Sleutelwoorden: LEXICOGRAFIE, WOORDENBOEK, TWEETALIG, CORPUS, FRE-QUENTIE, BANTOE, ZOELOE, ENGELS, IDEOFOON, SEMANTISCHE LADING, PARAFRASE, VLOEKENDE WOORDKLASSEN</p
... Our survey has shown an absence of restrictions on the terms used with the auxiliaries 'say' and/or 'do', which differs from languages such as those of the Bantu family (Samarin 1971, Creissels 1997 or Cushitic Iraqw (Mous 1993: 227-8, and p.c.) where the periphrastic construction is limited to a specific lexical class, viz., ideophones. In the languages considered here, the stem may belong to a range of grammatical classes: bases may be verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, ideophones, onomatopoeias. ...
The grammaticalization of verbs meaning ‘say' and ‘do', in periphrastic constructions traditionnally named ‘descriptive compounds' allows transcategorial and intracategorial derivation, leading to more or less deep reorganizations of the verbal systems. This is a recurring phenomenon, attested over a period of five milleniums, in Afroasiatic languages. The issue is dealt with from a syntactic, morphological, semantic, diachronic, typological and areal perspective in dead and living languages of North-East Africa, genetically linked or not (Cushitic, Omotic, Afro-Semitic, Egyptian, Coptic, a Nilo-Saharan language and Nubian). The study in then extended to some Saharan and Chadic languages spoken further in Central Africa where the phenomenon has not always been recognized as such. A typological classification is proposed. The sudy shows that the use of descriptive compounds is linked to inter-subjective modalities but not to any TAM value, and that it is possible to find synchronically all the stages of the grammaticalization process.
... One of the main problems that we face when we start reviewing sound symbolic literature is the incredible disagreement that exists among researchers on almost every aspect related to these words, i.e. their morpho-syntactic properties, their word class status, their semantics, their distribution… Even in apparently unproblematic issues such as giving a name to these words the literature offers us a never ending list of possibilities: 'first and second grade onomatopoeiae' (Ullman), 'lautsymbolik' (Schuhardt), 'mots expresifs' (Grammond), 'voces naturales' (García de Diego), 'descriptive words', 'echo-words', 'emphatics', 'ideophones', 'mimics', and so on (see Childs 1994 and Samarin 1970, 1971 for a discussion). 3 In this paper I will follow the guidelines established in Hinton et al.. (1994) for the study of sound symbolism. ...
... One lexical data base using LEXWARE has over 300 bands (Hsu 1990: 23); IGsi now'has forty-eight 13 I assume here some familiarity with ideo phones. For an early survey of Bantu ideophones, see Samarin 1971. Childs 1993a contains a more recent and e)(tensive discussion. ...
This paper presents some of the issues involved in preparing a bilingual dictionary for Kisi, an underdocumented language spoken in West Africa. Because the language possesses little in the way of literacy materials, fundamental issues as to orthography, word division, etc., had to be considered. In addition, no grammar of the language (or its closest congeners) was available and thus basic grammatical analysis had to be performed simultaneously. I briefly consider some of these problems, discussing the use of the lexical data base programs known as LEXWARE. I then focus on the specific problems raised by the expressive word class known to Africanists as ideophones. The conclusion, in the form of advice to future lexicographers of such languages, is that before undertaking such an endeavour, one must seriously assess its feasibility.
... Many languages of the world have a large grammatically defined class of sound symbolic words (called 'ideophones', 'expressives' or 'mimetics') in which the iconic relation between sounds and meaning is apparently felt by native speakers of the language and sometimes even by people who do not speak that language. Such a specialized word class exists in most of the East Asian languages (Japanese [6,7], Korean [8], Cantonese [9]), many of the Southeast Asian languages [10,11], most of the sub-Saharan African languages [12,13], some of the Australian Aboriginal languages [14,15], some of the South American languages [16,17] and some non-Indo-European languages of Europe (Finnish and Estonian [18], Basque [19]). Sound symbolic word classes may contain thousands of words; for example, one dictionary of Japanese mimetics lists 4500 entries [20]. ...
Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.
... Neither do the authoritative Ashéninka/Asháninka dictionaries list ideophonic vocabulary (Payne 1980; Heise et al. 2000), although ideophonic forms can be gleaned from the Pichis Ashéninka three-volume text collection (Anderson 1985Anderson , 1986), Tambo-Ene Asháninka dictionary (Kindberg 1980) and sample texts (Weiss 1975), and sample texts which accompany Kakinte morphology (Swift 1988). To present a multidimensional assessment of ideophonic phenomena in Alto Perené, this paper intends to systematically survey properties of Alto Perené ideophones within the grammatical class framework (Samarin 1971; Kulemeka 1995). In Kulemeka's words, ideophony is not confined to a certain syllable shape which is associated with some meaning in a language, nor is it restricted to onomatopoeic words which resemble sounds in the real world. ...
This research is a first attempt to survey ideophones in the Amazonian Arawak language Alto Perené (a.k.a. Ashéninka Perené). Based on fieldwork data, this study shows that ideophones constitute a separate class of words in Alto Perené in view of their distinctive phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. The study also draws on primary and secondary data from three other genetically related neighboring language varieties (Ashéninka Pichis, Asháninka Tambo-Ene, and Kakinte) to demonstrate a moderate degree of interdialect variation. The study suggests the possibility that the following properties may be regional affinities: non-canonical stress assignment; word class-specific reduplication of the word-final syllabic segments -ri, -re, -ro, -pi, -po expressing spatial distribution, intensity, or repeated/durative/open-ended temporal structure of the reported event; productive (V)k-suffixation contributing to the expression of punctual/perfective aspect; syntactic functions of appositional or coordinated predicate, co-verb, complement, and adverb; prevalence of Gestalt packaging of sensory events; a dearth of ideophones describing states.
This book offers a peer-reviewed selection of the best and most original contributions to the twenty-fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics. They faithfully reflect the spirit of the Conference in that they all display a shared passion for the diachronic study of language but also an exciting diversity of research questions, theoretical approaches, linguistic phenomena, and languages explored. Data are drawn from Algonquian, Arandic, Bantu, Cushitic, Edoid, Indo-European, Manchu, Tangkic, Tungusic, and Uralic—among other languages and language-families. In addition to addressing, always with new insights, more traditional concerns of historical linguistics, such as reconstruction, classification, the effects of contact and borrowing, the determinants of morphological, syntactic, phonological, and semantic change, this book presents studies on less conventional topics, for example the diachrony of ideophones.
This paper focuses on a nonnormative linguistic practice involving ideophones ( nyaudzosingwi ) among a Shona-speaking adolescent community of practice in urban Zimbabwe. Ideophones occupy a special position in Shona’s ethnolinguistic repertoire; they are culturally and linguistically salient, and highlighted in Shona classroom instruction. The perspective of Zimbabwe’s educational establishment is at odds with the on-the-ground situation, in which ideophones are exclusively the purview of older rural speakers. This dynamic puts young Shona speakers in a difficult situation: to succeed educationally, one is required to use ideophones, yet they are not a natural part of youth language. To balance these competing demands, young Shona speakers have developed a new use around ideophones that highlights the incongruity of balancing between being a “good Shona student” (fluency in “deep” Shona that eschews English influence) and a modern Shona subject (proficiency in English, upwardly socially mobile) by using them for unserious, comedic effect, where the humor deliberately derives from the idiosyncrasy of a young Shona speaker using ideophones. We also find a reduction in the morphosyntactic environments in which ideophones appear, in that they are always required to be introduced by a verbal element, and always the active form -ti , never the passive form -nzi .
El “lupino paisano” se refiere no solo a la semilla andina (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet) sino también a una red alimentaria. Argumentamos que esta red no está basada en una ontología moderna que separa la cultura y la naturaleza sino en lo que consideramos como “ontología relacional u ontología rizoma-actante”. Fundamentándonos en la teoría del actor-red de Bruno Latour (Actor Network Theory (ANT). Seguimos la ruta recorrida por la semilla de lupino desde la comunidad andina de Guayama San Pedro (el lugar de producción) hasta los valles de Cotopaxi (lugares de procesamiento y consumo) y su retorno a Guayama San Pedro. Todo esto es analizado como una serie de alianzas entre actantes. Concluimos que la red de lupino paisano abarca un grupo de entidades y de relaciones dinámicas entre ellos; no tiene una disposición centralizada ni es una “organizing memory”.
This article presents a descriptive study of ideophones in Moro, addressing both their structural characteristics and usage, with data from the Thetogovela dialect. We describe their sound patterns, word categorization and placement within sentences, and discuss their meaning and conventionalization. Moro ideophones convey a wide range of sensory meanings, including sound, touch, movement and visual patterns. They are uninflected and typically appear utterance finally, most closely resembling adverbs. Ideophones are often introduced by support verbs, including ‘do’, ‘be’ and ‘eat’, the latter for visual patterns. Ideophones may exhibit reduplication, which in some cases can correspond to pluractionality. The main distinctive sound pattern of Moro ideophones is a wider distribution of obstruents, as well as a performative use of expressive duration and phonation.
This is a Spanish translation of my University of Arizona published book, Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue and Perspective
DOWNLOAD HERE: https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.444/ — Ideophones (also known as expressives, mimetics or onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in language description and linguistic theory around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalization, scholars working on ideophones have made important advances in our understanding of sensory language, iconicity, lexical typology, and morphosyntax. Due to their dual nature as vocal gestures that grow roots in linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesizes past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.
An author's version is available at https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/files/91756153/OGBL_Crane_Lexical_Semantics_AcceptedVersionForPosting.pdf
This chapter describes important advances that have been made in studies of Bantu lexical semantics, and presents a broad overview of the ‘state-of-the-art’ of research in Bantu lexical semantics, while also pointing out areas where further research is called for. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to describing key issues in major word classes, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and adverbials, locatives and spatial terms, and ideophones. Also briefly discussed are derivational strategies and their semantic effects, and studies in historical lexical semantics and their cross-disciplinary significance.
Güldemann (1998 and following publications) not only challenged the “Khoisan” family hypothesis established by Greenberg (1950, 1963) and popular among non-specialists ever since, but also proposed the areal concept “Kalahari Basin” comprising the indigenous non-Bantu languages of southern Africa. If the linguistic isoglosses shared by these languages are compatible with a historical assessment in terms of multiple and partly long-standing contact, the areal approach is a viable explanation for the emergence of the modern linguistic panorama, as opposed to the genealogical hypothesis. Since the areal approach was proposed more than a decade ago research on linguistic isoglosses and contact-induced convergence across the Kalahari Basin has increased considerably. This article summarizes the earlier results, supplements them with new findings, thus giving more substance to the “Kalahari Basin” concept, and embeds it in the general discussion about linguistic areas.
Настоящий словарь включает в себя около полутора тысяч лексем английского языка, чье звукоизобразительное (подражательное, мимическое) происхождение было доказано рядом российских и зарубежных этимологов. В словаре приводятся сведения о значении слов, о времени их первой письменной фиксации, об их происхождении, регулярном фонетическом и семантическом развитии, а также о принадлежности к тому или иному классу звукоизображений. Словарь снабжен кратким справочным материалом по теории звукоизобразительности и списком работ по данной тематике. Рекомендуется специалистам по исторической лексикологии английского языка, звукоизобразительности, историкам языка, переводчикам, студентам и аспирантам-филологам.
Environmental sciences have contributed significantly to archaeological reconstructions of ancient and traditional agricultural systems in the Sonora and Chihuahua deserts of North America. Diverse agricultural systems have been documented, including a variety of irrigation, floodwater, runoff, and rock mulch systems. Because of unpredictable environmental conditions and highly variable growing seasons, ancient farmers commonly spread their fields over different soils and landforms, using multiple agricultural systems as a
buffering mechanism to ensure adequate food supplies. Soil, geomorphic, hydrologic, and paleoclimatic studies have played a crucial role in assessing the anthropogenic effects of cultivation and environmental effects of drought, flooding, and landscape change on agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Research on the Engaruka fields has thus far focused on documenting the distribution of different agricultural features and reconstructing the agricultural technology of this field system. It is now appropriate to apply various soil and environmental studies developed in the American Southwest to evaluating soil productivity and agricultural sustainability of the Engaruka fields. Recent soil studies in the Southwest have found that cultivation can alter physical and chemical soil properties such as bulk density, air and water permeability, pH,
and organic matter content, and that these changes may enhance or degrade soil productivity. The Engaruka fields are well suited for a similar soil study because: (1) soil formation proceeds slowly in this semiarid climate, so soil changes caused by cultivation are likely to persist and be detectable; (2) many field areas have not been cultivated since the fields were abandoned, so modern farming practices have not masked or erased soil properties reflecting ancient use; and (3) the presence of agricultural features and terraces provides important clues for discerning and sampling cultivated and uncultivated soils. Other types of environmental
studies, including paleohydraulic reconstructions of canals, stream flow reconstructions, and geomorphic and dendroclimatological studies, also have strong research potential for modelling agricultural sustainability of the Engaruka fields.
References
Doolittle, William E., 2000: Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Gummerman, George J., 1988: The Anasazi in a Changing Environment. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Homburg, Jeffrey A., 1997: Prehistoric dryland agricultural fields of the Lower Verde. In Homburg J. A. and
Ciolek-Torrello, R. (eds.): Vanishing River: Landscapes and Lives of the Lower Verde Valley: The Lower
Verde Archaeological Project. Vol. 2: Agricultural, Subsistence, and Environmental Studies. Pp. 103-126.
CD-ROM. SRI Press, Tucson.
Homburg, Jeffrey A., and Ciolek-Torrello, Richard, 1997: Vanishing River: Landscapes and Lives of the Lower
Verde Valley: The Lower Verde Archaeological Project. Vol. 2: Agricultural, Subsistence, and
Environmental Studies. CD-ROM. SRI Press, Tucson.
Homburg, Jeffrey A., and Sandor, Jonathan A., 1997: An agronomic study of two classic period agricultural
fields in the Horseshoe Basin (with Jonathan A. Sandor). In Homburg J. A. and Ciolek-Torrello, Richard
(eds.): Vanishing River: Landscapes and Lives of the Lower Verde Valley: The Lower Verde
Archaeological Project. Vol. 2: Agricultural, Subsistence, and Environmental Studies. 103-126 pp. CDROM.
SRI Press, Tucson.
Sandor, Jonathan A. Gersper, Paul L. and Hawley, John W., 1990: Prehistoric agricultural terraces and soils in
the Mimbres area, New Mexico. World Archaeology 22(1): 70-86.
Sutton, John E. G., 1978: Engaruka and its waters. Azania 13: 37-70.
Sutton, John E. G., 1986: The irrigation and manuring of the Engaruka field system. Azania: 27-52.
Sutton, John E. G., 2000: Engaruka: an irrigation agricultural community in northern Tanzania before the
Maasai. British Institute in Eastern Africa with the Tanzanian Antiquities Unit, Nairobi, (reprinted from
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Van West, Carla R., 1994: Modeling Prehistoric Agricultural Productivity in Southwestern Colorado: A GIS
Approach. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado.
Key Words: Engaruka, soil chemistry, agricultural history, Southwest USA
Kirk Hazen is a Woodburn Professor and Associate Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He specializes in variationist sociolinguistics. His interests include Appalachian English, African-American English, and varieties of Southern US English. His teaching goal is to foster better understanding of language variation.
This advanced historical linguistics course book deals with the historical and comparative study of African languages. The first part functions as an elementary introduction to the comparative method, involving the establishment of lexical and grammatical cognates, the reconstruction of their historical development, techniques for the subclassification of related languages, and the use of language-internal evidence, more specifically the application of internal reconstruction. Part II addresses language contact phenomena and the status of language in a wider, cultural-historical and ecological context. Part III deals with the relationship between comparative linguistics and other disciplines. In this rich course book, the author presents valuable views on a number of issues in the comparative study of African languages, more specifically concerning genetic diversity on the African continent, the status of pidginised and creolised languages, language mixing, and grammaticalisation.
This article presents empirical evidence of the high referential specificity of sound-symbolic words, based on a FrameNet-aided analysis of collocational data of Japanese mimetics. The definition of mimetics, particularly their semantic definition, has been crosslinguistically the most challenging problem in the literature, and different researchers have used different adjectives (most notably, “vivid,” since Doke 1935) to describe their semantic peculiarity. The present study approaches this longstanding issue from a frame-semantic point of view combined with a quantitative method. It was found that mimetic manner adverbials generally form a frame-semantically restricted range of verbal/nominal collocations than non-mimetic ones. Each mimetic can thus be considered to evoke a highly specific frame, which elaborates the general frame evoked by its typical host predicate and contains a highly limited set of frame elements, which correlate and constrain one another. This conclusion serves as a unified account of previously reported phenomena concerning mimetics, including the lack of hyponymy, the one-mimetic-per-clause restriction, and unparaphrasability. This study can be also viewed as a methodological proposal for the measurement of frame specificity, which supplements bottom-up linguistic tests.
Ideophones are found in many of the world’s languages. Though they are a major word class on a par with nouns and verbs, their origins are ill-understood, and the question of ideophone creation has been a source of controversy. This paper studies ideophone creation in naturally occurring speech. New, unconventionalised ideophones are identified using native speaker judgements, and are studied in context to understand the rules and regularities underlying their production and interpretation. People produce and interpret new ideophones with the help of the semiotic infrastructure that underlies the use of existing ideophones: foregrounding frames certain stretches of speech as depictive enactments of sensory imagery, and various types of iconicity link forms and meanings. As with any creative use of linguistic resources, context and common ground also play an important role in supporting rapid ‘good enough’ interpretations of new material. The making of new ideophones is a special case of a more general phenomenon of creative depiction: the art of presenting verbal material in such a way that the interlocutor recognises and interprets it as a depiction.
DOWNLOAD PDF: http://is.gd/lncreview — 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.
This article examines the relation between ideophones and gestures in a corpus of everyday discourse in Siwu, a richly ideophonic language spoken in Ghana. The overall frequency of ideophone-gesture couplings in everyday speech is lower than previously suggested, but two findings shed new light on the relation between ideophones and gesture. First, discourse type makes a difference: ideophone-gesture couplings are more frequent in narrative contexts, a finding that explains earlier claims, which were based not on everyday language use but on elicited narratives. Second, there is a particularly strong coupling between ideophones and one type of gesture: iconic gestures. This coupling allows us to better understand iconicity in relation to the affordances of meaning and modality. Ultimately, the connection between ideophones and iconic gestures is explained by reference to the depictive nature of both. Ideophone and iconic gesture are two aspects of the process of depiction.
The ideophone, a word class not unique to but highly characteristic of the Bantu languages, presents particular challenges in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Not only is this part of speech without a counterpart in most other languages, the meaning of ideo-phones is highly elusive. In this research article these challenges are studied by means of an analy-sis of the treatment of ideophones in a corpus-driven Zulu–English school dictionary project.
Ideophony is a neglected aspect of investigations of world poetic traditions. This article looks at the use of ideophony in a variety of Navajo poetic genres. Examples are given from Navajo place-names, narratives, and songs. A final example involves the use of ideophony in contemporary written Navajo poetry. Using the work of Woodbury, Friedrich, and Becker it is argued that ideophones are an example of form-dependent expression, poetic indeterminacy, and the inherent exuberances and deficiencies of translation and thus strongly resists translation. This fact becomes more relevant when understood in light of the current language shift from Navajo to English.
Abstract The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also catalyzed a number of experimental studies by psychologists and linguists in search of a universal sound-symbolic substrate underlying all languages. Although the search for a sound-symbolic substrate has been abandoned, the success rates of these studies have never been satisfactorily explained. Sound-symbolic processes have had a definitive impact on morphological analyses of phonesthemes and on historical linguists' understandings of diachronic processes. A typologically widespread form of sound symbolism occurs as a kind of lexical class known as the ideophone, which is conspicuously underdeveloped in standard average European languages, and highly perplexing for linguists and anthropologists. Although it has always been a respectable domain of inquiry in ethnopoetics and interpretive ethnography, the case for sound symbolism has of late been argued with renewed vigor on the part of psychological anthropologists and philosophers who see a paradigm shift under way.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.