Abstract
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.
Highlights
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory scenes like c’onc’on ‘woven tightly’, ulakpulak ‘unbalanced, scary appearance’ and colcol ‘flowing liquid’ in Korean, or mukumuku ‘mumbling mouth movements’, gelegele ‘glittery appearance’ and gbadara-gbadara ‘a drunkard’s wobbling gait’ in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana (Dingemanse 2012)
They have been recognised as a major lexical class in West-African languages for at least 150 years, and equivalent phenomena have since been described in many languages across Asia and the Americas
While Doke’s work allowed ideophones to be described as part of the grammar of a language, a key question remained: what made them so different from other words that they seemed at times hardly part of language? An answer emerged in work on Shona and Sesotho, two Bantu languages of southern Africa: perhaps ideophones were fundamentally different in semiotic terms, as words that show rather than tell
Summary
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory scenes like c’onc’on ‘woven tightly’, ulakpulak ‘unbalanced, scary appearance’ and colcol ‘flowing liquid’ in Korean, or mukumuku ‘mumbling mouth movements’, gelegele ‘glittery appearance’ and gbadara-gbadara ‘a drunkard’s wobbling gait’ in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana (Dingemanse 2012) They have been recognised as a major lexical class in West-African languages for at least 150 years, and equivalent phenomena have since been described in many languages across Asia and the Americas. There are enough cross-linguistic similarities to identify a common core that can serve as a basis for cross-linguistic comparison This survey adopts a broad definition of ideophones that is designed to capture this core, while leaving room for language-specific differences in implementation: ideophones are “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2012: 655). The term “onomatopoeia” is usually understood to be limited to words imitative of sound (Moore 2015), and forms a proper subset of “ideophones”
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