what are the characteristics of ideophones

Ideophones are often characterized as iconic or sound-symbolic words, meaning that there can be a resemblance between their form and their meaning.

Full Answer

What are ideophones?

In the discipline of linguistics, ideophones have long been overlooked or treated as mysterious words, though a recent surge of interest in sound symbolism, iconicity and linguistic diversity has brought them renewed attention. An often-cited definition of the notion of ideophone is the following by Clement Martyn Doke

Are ideophones lexical or lexical?

Ideophones combine iconicity and arbitrariness, and lexical iconicity in ideophones is best characterised as a weak bias, which is supported by multimodal performances in actual use and which may be amplified in cultural evolution (cf our TiCS paper ).

Are people sensitive to ideophones they’ve never heard?

The basic finding is this: people are sensitive to the meaning of ideophones they’ve never heard, even when they are produced out of context by a computer voice in a difficult forced choice task. Yet there is also reason for caution: the effect is not nearly as strong as what people have found for pseudowords like bouba and kiki.

How do you explain ideophones in assimilation?

In assimilation, we explain away a phenomenon by assuming it’s the same as something already familiar (and marginal anyway), giving us a reason to neglect it. In the case of ideophones, this is often done by shelving them away as interjections or as onomatopoeia.

What are ideophones and examples?

idiophone, class of musical instruments in which a resonant solid material—such as wood, metal, or stone—vibrates to produce the initial sound. The eight basic types are concussion, friction, percussion, plucked, scraped, shaken, stamped, and stamping.

What is the meaning of ideophones?

ideophone in American English a form that conveys an idea or impression, as in certain African languages, by means of a sound, often reduplicated, that suggests an action, quality, manner, etc.

What is the difference between onomatopoeia and ideophones?

Ideophones are a more general form of onomatopoeic expressions. While the latter phonetically imitate or suggest the source of the sounds that they describe, ideophones evoke a vivid impression of an idea which can be a sound, colour, smell or some other feeling (e.g. stickiness).

What is an ideophone synonym?

However, in such cases the word ideophone is used as a synonym to interjection.

What is a onomatopoeia example?

Onomatopoeia definition: a word that sounds like the noise it describes. Some onomatopoeia examples include the words boing, gargle, clap, zap, and pitter-patter.

How do you pronounce ideophone?

0:051:02How To Pronounce Ideophone - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipIría iría e hirió sol y dios sol iría hirió sol.MoreIría iría e hirió sol y dios sol iría hirió sol.

What are idiophones instruments?

An idiophone is any musical instrument that creates sound primarily by the vibration of the instrument itself, without the use of air flow (as with aerophones), strings (chordophones), membranes (membranophones) or electricity (electrophones).

What is the classification of Idiophone?

Contrary to the popular assumption that an idiophone is a wind instrument played by stupid people, an idiophone is actually a world music classification for instruments that produce sound from the material of the instrument itself without the assistance of reeds, strings, or other externally applied resonator.

What is an ideophone?

A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, color, sound, smell, action, state or intensity. Ideophones evoke sensory events. A well known instance of ideophones are onomatopoeic words – words that imitate the sound (of the event) they refer to.

What is the meaning of ideophones?

Ideophones are often characterized as iconic or sound-symbolic words, meaning that there can be a resemblance between their form and their meaning. For instance, in West-African languages, voiced consonants and low tone in ideophones are often connected to large and heavy meanings, whereas voiceless consonants and high tones tend to relate to small and light things. Reduplication figures quite prominently in ideophones, often conveying a sense of repetition or plurality present in the evoked event. The iconicity of ideophones is shown by the fact that people can guess the meanings of ideophones from various languages at a level above chance. However, not everything about the form of ideophones directly relates to their meaning; as conventionalized words, they contain arbitrary, language-specific phonemes just like other parts of the vocabulary.

What does "ideophone" mean in Zulu?

In Xhosa, as in closely related Zulu, ideophones can convey very complex experiential impressions or can just strengthen meanings of other words. The ideophone is often introduced using a dummy verb, -thi, which means "say."

What is the difference between ideophones and interjections?

However, they are distinct in a number of ways. Whereas interjections usually occur on their own, ideophones more often modify other utterances, providing an illustration of a scene the utterance is about. Also, ideophones are more like illustrations of events than responses to events.

What is an example of Japanese sound symbolism?

sound ( onomatopoeia ), movement, color, shape, or action. Ideophones are found in many of the world's languages, though they are claimed to be relatively uncommon in ...

What language is an ideophone used in?

In some languages, ideophones are primarily used in spoken language (e.g. narrative contexts) and are rarely encountered in written language. In other languages (e.g. Ewe, Japanese ), ideophones can be freely used in all registers.

What is reduplication in ideophones?

Reduplication figures quite prominently in ideophones, often conveying a sense of repetition or plurality present in the evoked event. The iconicity of ideophones is shown by the fact that people can guess the meanings of ideophones from various languages at a level above chance.

What is an ideophone?

Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery (Dingemanse 2012), also defined —only partly tongue-in-cheek— as “those words which are such fun to use” (Welmers 1973). They are found abundantly in many Asian and African languages, as well as in some Amerindian languages. As a class of words, they seems to be rare in Indo-European languages. See ideophone.org/papers for some publications about ideophones in a range of languages.

What is the role of ideophones in morphology?

As he noted, “these exotic phenomena pervade the world’s languages with a regularity and complexity that makes them both essential and ideal for testing any theory of morphology”. By the way, that ideophones could be described as “exotic phenomena” and as “pervading the world’s languages with regularity” in one sentence is a perfect illustration of the viewpoint dependence of notions of marginality

How do ideophones come to be marginal?

As many have pointed out, ideophones have long been treated as marginal in linguistics. But how does something come to be seen as marginal? For ideophones, I found there are two basic strategies: assimilation and exceptionalism. In assimilation, we explain away a phenomenon by assuming it’s the same as something already familiar (and marginal anyway), giving us a reason to neglect it. In the case of ideophones, this is often done by shelving them away as interjections or as onomatopoeia. Exceptionalism is the reverse: we stress the utter difference of a phenomenon and thereby place it outside the bounds of normal linguistic inquiry — another reason to neglect it (or leave its investigation to scholars happy to work on ‘exotic’ topics).

What is iconicity session?

This session is devoted to the theme of integrating iconicity. It brings together current work on the varied roles of iconicity in linguistic organisation and communication, with a special focus on linking recent findings from iconicity research to insights from comparative and cognitive linguistics. The session features empirical and theoretical contributions from across the language sciences. Themes covered include typology, semiotics, language evolution, reduplication, sensitivity to sound-symbolism, and embodiment.

Why are ideophones important?

As ideophones are increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, they make visible our scholarly biases; they help us innovate methods and theories; and they keep giving us reasons to look at language with fresh eyes.

What is iconicity in language?

The study of iconicity —the resemblance or simulation-based mapping of form and meaning— is seeing a renaissance across the language sciences (Perniss et al. 2010; Svantesson 2017). Studies of signed and spoken languages show the importance of iconicity alongside other organizing principles in lexical and grammatical structure, learning experiments shows how iconicity may help word learning and rely on widespread cross-modal associations, the study of natural discourse organization demonstrates how theatrical staging of action plays a fundamental role, and work in experimental semiotics reveals the affordances and limitations of iconicity in the origin and evolution of communication systems (Fay et al. 2014; Perniss & Vigliocco 2014; Winter et al. 2017; Ferrara & Hodge 2018).

What is striking about ideophone studies?

Speaking of native speakers, one thing that is striking when you take any reasonably comprehensive bibliography of ideophone studies is the number of contributions by scholars who are also native speakers. It is hard to find other linguistic phenomena that have benefited so much from work by linguists with native speaker sensibilities. Especially in the last decades, this has shaped the course of developments in ideophone studies in important ways.

What are ideophones in the language?

Ideophones are words that vividly depict sensory experience with marked forms. They abound in many languages of the world, including Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Quechuan languages as well as Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Basque. The term “ideophone” originates in Bantu linguistics but is applied across languages. Ideophones are also known as “mimetics” in Japanese linguistics and “expressives” in South and Southeast Asian linguistics. Arguably all spoken languages have onomatopoeic (sound-imitative) ideophones (e.g., woof-woof, wham ), and many languages also have ideophones for non-auditory information, such as motion (e.g., plisti-plasta ‘walking in water’ (Basque)), shine (e.g., ɡéɡéréré ‘shining brightly’ (Chewa)), shape (e.g., tíɡhí-tìɡhì-tíɡhí ‘twisted’ (Edo)), and texture (e.g., lip rip ‘smooth, flat’ (Hausa)). Ideophones in some languages further depict color (e.g., yibɔɔ ‘black’ (Ewe)), taste and smell (e.g., thuu ‘smelling horribly’ (Venda)), proprioceptive sensations (e.g., rupax ‘intensely warm or burning’ (Pastaza Quichua)), and emotion (e.g., zokuzoku ‘thrilled’ (Japanese)). These sensory meanings are often iconically represented by some marked morphophonological features, such as unusual phonotactics (e.g., /ɡb/ (Kisi)), vowel or tonal harmony (e.g., ɡbànɡbàlànɡ ‘long pole falling down’ (Dagaare)), and total or partial reduplication (e.g., tʃoɭtʃoɭ ‘in continuous flow’ (Korean), kananaa ‘silent’ (Siwu)). The formal markedness of ideophones may be further emphasized by lengthening (e.g., baaaang ), prominent intonation, special phonation (e.g., falsetto, creaky voice), distinct speech rate, and syntactic isolation (e.g., holophrastic realization). Moreover, as a nonverbal manifestation of their performative nature, ideophones often synchronize with iconic gestures. Ideophones constitute a prototype category for which none of these features are either necessary or sufficient, and often, one cannot decide clearly whether a word is an ideophone or not. Furthermore, ideophones are integrated with the linguistic system to varying degrees both within and across languages. For example, holophrastic ideophones tend to have expressive prosody and be accompanied by iconic gestures, whereas predicative ideophones tend to be plain. Reflecting this behavioral diversity of ideophones, earlier studies focused on sound-symbolic generalizations and categorial definitions in individual languages, notably Asian and African languages. However, a growing body of research from the 1990s onward has sought the theoretical and typological significance of this word class.

What is ideophone review?

A widely referenced review of linguistic and psychological studies on sound-symbolic phenomena, including ideophones.

Which two languages have ideophones?

Brief overviews of ideophonic elements in Dagaare (Niger-Congo) and Cantonese (Sino-Tibetan). The author observes that ideophones in both languages exhibit phonological, morphological, and pragmatic uniqueness, but they have different syntactic statuses.

Who edited the book "Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe"?

Ameka, Felix K. 2001. Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe. In Ideophones. Edited by Friedrich K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 25–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

What is the mark of an ideophone?

Ideophones are MARKED in the sense that they stand out from other words. Claims about the marked nature of ideophones abound in the literature: ideophones are “very striking” (Vidal 1852:15 on Yoruba), “distinguished by their aberrant phonology” (Kruspe 2004:102 on Semelai), “structurally marked” (Klamer 2002:263 on Kambera), “phonologically peculiar” (Newman 1968:107 on Hausa), and show “distinctive phonology, involving special rules of length, tone, and stress” (Epps 2005:869 on Hup), to take just five typologically divergent languages. Of course, what is marked in one phonological system may not be marked in another. Exactly how the structural markedness of ideophones works out in a given language is a fact that belongs to the description of that language.

Who wrote the article "Ideophones from a syntactic point of view"?

Newman, Paul. 1968. “Ideophones from a syntactic point of view.” Journal of West African Languages 5: 107-117.

Overview

Characteristics

Examples

Further reading

See also

Bibliography