Ideophones in Temne

Abstract

The question of whether or not ideophones constitute a separate word class in a language has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. While Newman (1968), Courtenay (1976), Marivate (1985), Creissels (2001), Laughlin (2007), Beck (2008), among others, argue that ideophones in their languages of research form a subset of one of the major word classes, others like Alpher (1994) assign them to a separate part of speech. Although the problem of classifying ideophones into a lexical category has been addressed in many languages, the case of Temne remains unclear. As in many languages, ideophones in Temne have a number of distinctive phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties. Regarding the phonology of ideophones, Wilson (1961:43) states that, “ideophones are pronounced on a higher or lower pitch than other words and are more susceptible to individual manipulation”. Right from the outset, Wilson sees ideophones as a set of words that are distinct from all other words in the language. He classifies ideophones into two groups: those which “emphasize abstract notions or states”, and those “describing actions or sounds”. Valuable as it is, Wilson’s work on ideophones is not only brief, but also silent on the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of ideophones. Most significantly, Wilson did not address the issue of the word class to which ideophones belong. In this paper, I identify and describe the distinctive properties of ideophones in Temne and argue on the basis of their syntactic distribution and functions that they do not form a coherent word class. Rather, they belong to two different parts of speech. Some ideophones constitute a subset of adverbs, while a small set of ideophones constitute a separate language specific word class that I will refer to as intensifiers. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 examines the various approaches in defining parts of speech and advances reasons why lexical classes in Temne should be defined in terms of their syntactic functions and distribution. The distinctive properties of ideophones are discussed in section 3. Section 4 highlights the syntax of adverbs, followed by a comparison of their syntactic functions and distribution with ideophones in section 5. The results of the study are summarized in section 6.