Chapter 9
On the grammaticalization of ideophones
Ideophones, like English bang or
thud, are interactive expressions used as vivid
depictions of sensory imagery of states, events, objects, or
qualities (cf. Dingemanse
2011, 2012,
2018; Dingemanse & Akita 2017;
Andrason 2020, 2021). They are claimed to
represent a universal class of linguistic forms – that is, any given
language can be expected to have a set of them. That set may be
highly limited, as is the case in many European languages, but it
may as well be almost as large as that of lexical categories like
nouns and verbs. There are thousands of ideophones in the spoken
usage of languages like Korean, Japanese and Basque, which have 4500
or more of them (see Dingemanse
2018; Haiman
2018). Ideophones exhibit an ambivalent structural
behavior. On the one hand, they have been described as grammatical
forms that are syntactically unattached and prosodically set off
from surrounding text material. On the other hand, they have also
been described as morphosyntactically integrated adverbials,
adjectivals, verbals, or nominals in a number of languages. Building
on some earlier work (especially Dwyer & Moshi 2003), the goal of the present paper
is to look at ideophones from the perspective of grammaticalization
theory with a view to accounting for this ambivalent behavior. It is
argued in the paper that we are dealing here with a process that
differs from ‘canonical’ grammaticalization in that the end-product
of the process is a lexical rather than a grammatical form.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1On ideophones
- 1.2Definition
- 1.3Grammatical features
- 2.Ideophones as interactives
- 2.1Interactives
- 2.2Problems
- 3.Grammaticalization
- 3.1Diagnostics
- 3.2Ideophones in Siwu
- 3.3Ideophones in Xhosa
- 3.3.1The quotative construction
- 3.3.2The modifier construction
- 3.4Discussion
- 4.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Andrason, Alexander & Andrew Harvey
2024.
Instability of interactives: The case of interjections in Gorwaa.
Open Linguistics 10:1

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