Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse
Mark Dingemanse | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk with special reference to ideophones. To understand these phenomena, it is useful to distinguish two modes of representation in language — description and depiction — along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that help steer listener’s interpretations from one to the other. Reduplication can partake in both modes, which is why it is common in ideophones and other areas of grammar. Using evidence from a range of languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk, and argues that both description and depiction are fundamental to understanding how language works.
Akita, Kimi. 2009. A Grammar of Sound-Symbolic Words in Japanese: Theoretical Approaches to Iconic and Lexical Properties of Japanese Mimetics. Kobe: Kobe University dissertation. [URL].
Bateson, Gregory. 1955. A theory of play and fantasy. Psychiatric Research Reports 2(39). 39–51.
Beck, David. 2008. Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac. International Journal of American Linguistics 74(1). 1–46.
Bergman, Brita & Östen Dahl. 1994. Ideophones in Sign Language? The place of reduplication in the tense-aspect system of Swedish Sign Language. In Carl Bache, Hans Basbøll & Carl-Erik Lindberg (eds.), Tense, aspect and action: Empirical and theoretical contributions to language typology, 397–422. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bolinger, Dwight L. 1961. Generality, gradience, and the all-or-none. The Hague: Mouton & co.
Bolinger, Dwight L. 1968. Aspects of language. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Casati, Roberto. 2006. The cognitive science of holes and cast shadows. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(2). 54–55.
Childs, G. Tucker. 1988. The phonology and morphology of Kisi. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley dissertation.
Childs, G. Tucker. 1989. Where do ideophones come from?Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 19(2). 55–76.
Childs, G. Tucker. 1994. African Ideophones. In Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols & John J. Ohala (eds.), Sound Symbolism,178–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Herbert H. & Richard J. Gerrig. 1990. Quotations as demonstrations. Language 66(4). 764–805.
Croft, William & Eva van Lier. 2012. Language universals without universal categories. Theoretical Linguistics 38 (1-2).
Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1979. Hixkaryana. Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co.
Dhoorre, Cabdulqaadir Salaad & Mauro Tosco. 1998. 111 Somali ideophones. Journal of African Cultural Studies 11(2). 125–156.
Diffloth, Gérard. 1976. Expressives in Semai. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications 131. 249–264.
Diffloth, Gérard. 1980. Expressive phonology and prosaic phonology in Mon-Khmer. In Theraphan L. Thongkum (ed.), Studies in Mon-Khmer and Thai phonology and phonetics in honor of E. Henderson, 49–59. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press.
Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10). 654–672.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1997. Are grammatical relations universal? In Joan Bybee, John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Essays on language function and language type, 115–143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Floyd, Simeon. 2012. Four types of reduplication in the Cha’palaa language of Ecuador. In Hein van der Voort & Gale Goodwin Gómez (eds.), Reduplication in South American Indian languages. Leiden: Brill.
Gil, David. 2005. From repetition to reduplication in Riau Indonesian. In Bernhard Hurch & Veronika Mattes (eds.), Studies on reduplication. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gombrich, E.H. 2002. Art & illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation, 6th edn. London/New York: Phaidon.
Gómez, Gale Goodwin. 2009. Reduplication, ideophones, and onomatopoeic repetition in the Yanomami languages. Grazer Linguistische Studien 711. 21–38.
Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of art: An approach to the theory of symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamano, Shoko Saito. 1998. The sound-symbolic system of Japanese. Stanford: CSLI.
Havránek, Bohuslav. 1964. The functional differentiation of the standard language. In Paul L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School reader on esthetics, literary structure, and style, 3–16. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Hodge, Gabrielle, and Lindsay Ferrara. 2014. “Showing the Story: Enactment as Performance in Auslan Narratives.” In L. Gawne and J. Vaughan (eds.),
Selected Papers from the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society
, 372–97. Melbourne, Australia. [URL].
Hodge, Gabrielle & Trevor Johnston. 2014. Points, depictions, gestures and enactment: Partly lexical and non-lexical signs as core elements of single clause-like units in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(2). 262–291.
Hurch, B., M. Kajitani, V. Mattes, U. Stangel & R. Vollmann. 2008. Other reduplication phenomena. [URL].
Hutchinson, John & Gerd Gigerenzer. 2005. Simple heuristics and rules of thumb: Where psychologists and behavioural biologists might meet. Behavioural processes 69(2). 97–124.
Inkelas, Sharon. 2008. The dual theory of reduplication. Linguistics 46(2). 351–401.
Inkelas, Sharon & Cheryl Zoll. 2005. Reduplication: Doubling in morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and Poetics. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kadooka, Ken-Ichi. 2007. Nihongo onomatope-goi-ni-okeru keitaiteki-on’inteki-taikeisei-ni-tuite [On morphological and phonological systematicity in Japanese onomatopoeic vocabularies]. Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers.
Kendon, Adam. 1980. Gesticulation and speech: Two aspects of the process of utterance. In Mary Ritchie Key (ed.), The relationship of verbal and nonverbal communication, 207–227. The Hague: Mouton.
Kosslyn, Stephen M. 1980. Image and mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kouwenberg, Silvia & Darlene LaCharité. 2001. The iconic interpretations of reduplication: Issues in the study of reduplication in Caribbean Creole languages. European Journal of English Studies 5(1). 59–80.
Kunene, Daniel P. 1965. The ideophone in Southern Sotho. Journal of African Languages 41. 19–39.
Lee, Jin-Seong. 1992. Phonology and sound symbolism of Korean ideophones. Indiana University dissertation.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1995. Interactional biases in human thinking. In Esther N. Goody (ed.), Social intelligence and interaction: Expressions and implications of the social bias in human intelligence, 221–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
Magritte, René. 1929. Les mots et les images. La Révolution surréaliste 121. 32–33.
Martin, Samuel E. 1962. Phonetic symbolism in Korean. In Nicholas Poppe (ed.), American studies in Altaic linguistics, 177–189. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications.
Matisoff, James A. 2003. Aslian: Mon-Khmer of the Malay Peninsula. Mon-Khmer Studies: 1–58.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1992. Iconicity and generative grammar. Language 68(4). 756–796.
Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103(1/2). 145–169.
Nuckolls, Janis B. 1996. Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pott, August Friedrich. 1862. Doppelung (Reduplikation, Gemination): als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache, beleuchtet aus Sprachen aller Welttheile. Lemgo & Detmold: Meyer.
Rai, Novel Kishore, Balthasar Bickel, Goma Banjade, Martin Gaenszle, Elena Lieven, Netra Paudyal, Ichchha Rai & Sabine Stoll. 2005. Triplication and ideophones in Chintang. In Yogendra Yadava, Govinda Bhattarai, Ram Raj Lohani, Balaram Prasain & Krishna Parajuli (eds.), Contemporary issues in Nepalese linguistics, 205–209. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society of Nepal.
Samarin, William J. 1965. Perspective on African ideophones. African Studies 24(2). 117–121.
Schwaiger, Thomas. 2013. On the structure of reduplicants: Iconicity and preferred form in reduplication. In Nabil Hathout, Fabio Montermini & Jess Tseng (eds.), Morphology in Toulouse: Selected Proceedings of Décembrettes 71, 211–229. München: LINCOM Europa.
Shintel, Hadas, Howard C. Nusbaum & Arika Okrent. 2006. Analog acoustic expression in speech communication. Journal of Memory and Language 55(2). 167–177.
Sien, Nam-Cheol. 1997. An autosegmental analysis of ideophones in Korean. University of Washington dissertation.
Slama-Cazacu, Tatiana. 1976. Nonverbal components in message sequence:‘Mixed syntax’. In W.C. McCormack & S.A. Wurm (eds.), Language and man: Anthropological issues: 217–227. The Hague: Mouton.
Sonesson, Göran. 1997. The ecological foundations of iconicity. In Irmengard Rauch & Gerald F. Carr (eds.),
Semiotics around the world: Synthesis in diversity. Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of the IASS, Berkeley
, June 12-18, 1994, 739–742. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stolz, Thomas, Cornelia Stroh & Aina Urdze. 2011. Total reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal. Oldenbourg: Akademie Verlag.
Thun, Nils. 1963. Reduplicative words in English; a study of formations of the types tick-tick, hurly-burly, and shilly-shally. Uppsala: Carl Bloms Boktryckeri.
Tufvesson, Sylvia. 2011. Analogy-making in the Semai sensory world. The Senses and Society 6(1). 86–95.
Walton, Kendall L. 1973. Pictures and Make-Believe. The Philosophical Review 82(3). 283–319.
Wang, Shih-ping. 2005. Corpus-based approaches and discourse analysis in relation to reduplication and repetition. Journal of Pragmatics 37(4). 505–540.
Westermann, Diedrich Hermann. 1927. Laut, Ton und Sinn in westafrikanischen Sudansprachen. In Franz Boas (ed.), Festschrift Meinhof, 315–328. Hamburg: L. Friederichsen.
Whitney, William Dwight. 1874. Physei or thesei - natural or conventional?Transactions of the American Philological Association 61. 95–116.
Zwicky, Arnold M. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1987. Plain morphology and expressive morphology. In John Aske, Beery, Natasha, Laura Michaelis & Hana Filip (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, VII1:330–340. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Cited by (45)
Cited by 45 other publications
Akinbo, Samuel Kayode & Michael Bulkaam
2024. Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9:1
Akinbo, Samuel Kayode & Philip Oghenesuowho Ekiugbo
2024. Iconicity as the motivation for morphophonological metathesis and truncation in Nigerian Pidgin. Open Linguistics 10:1
Di Paola, Giovanna, Ljiljana Progovac & Antonio Benítez-Burraco
2024. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution. Linguistics Vanguard 0:0
2023. Sesotho ideophones as personal names: A systemic functional linguistics approach. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 41:4 ► pp. 448 ff.
Patel-Grosz, Pritty, Salvador Mascarenhas, Emmanuel Chemla & Philippe Schlenker
2023. Super Linguistics: an introduction. Linguistics and Philosophy 46:4 ► pp. 627 ff.
Beukeleers, Inez & Myriam Vermeerbergen
2022. Show Me What You’ve B/Seen: A Brief History of Depiction. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Capirci, Olga, Chiara Bonsignori & Alessio Di Renzo
2022. Signed Languages: A Triangular Semiotic Dimension. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Hodge, Gabrielle & Lindsay Ferrara
2022. Iconicity as Multimodal, Polysemiotic, and Plurifunctional. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Kentner, Gerrit, Isabelle Franz & Winfried Menninghaus
2022. Poetics of reduplicative word formation: evidence from a rating and recall experiment. Language and Cognition 14:3 ► pp. 333 ff.
Meurant, Laurence
2022. Put another way. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 36 ► pp. 145 ff.
2019. Reported speech as enactment. Linguistic Typology 23:1 ► pp. 185 ff.
Ferrara, Lindsay & Gabrielle Hodge
2018. Language as Description, Indication, and Depiction. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Kwon, Nahyun
2018. Iconicity correlated with vowel harmony in Korean ideophones. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2018. Experimental evidence for the productivity of total reduplication in Japanese ideophones and ordinary vocabulary. Language Sciences 66 ► pp. 166 ff.
2018. Introduction. Studies in Language 42:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Schwaiger, Thomas
2018. The derivational nature of reduplication: Towards a Functional Discourse Grammar account of a non-concatenative morphological process. Word Structure 11:1 ► pp. 118 ff.
Taitz, Alan, M. Florencia Assaneo, Natalia Elisei, Mónica Trípodi, Laurent Cohen, Jacobo D. Sitt, Marcos A. Trevisan & Niels O. Schiller
2018. The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation. PLOS ONE 13:3 ► pp. e0193466 ff.
2017. Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 70:2 ► pp. 363 ff.
Dingemanse, Mark
2018. Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.