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<DIV>Hi. Ives Goddard told me once (if I'm remembering right) that as a family Algonkian is like that- a handful of generic noise terms that can be made more specific by adding a nominal, etc.</DIV>
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<DIV>I collected onomatopoeic vocabulary from secondary sources (dictionaries, wordlists) from hundreds of languages a while back during my crosslinguistic project, looking for typological patterns. What I found was that the more morphosyntactically synthetic a language was, or the more fusional, the fewer were the numbers of free ideophones. Any onomatopoeias are more likely to be lexicalized (as in English). How they are portioned out to the major word classes may depend on the larger language type- noun versus verb oriented, etc.</DIV>
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<DIV>If a language has only a handful of generic terms, as in Algonkian, one wonders whether this might be a symptom of near-grammaticalization, so we would have the implicational chain of pre-lexical (ideophones)>lexical>postlexical(grams). Yahgan has a reconstructable suffix -sh which is found attached to many lexicalized onomatopes (there are few free ones), and this suffix does not appear to be any kind of generic quotative- it is ONLY found with onomatopes. Perhaps this is an example of an actual grammaticalization.</DIV>
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<DIV>Jess Tauber</DIV>
<DIV>phonosemantics@earthlink.net</DIV>
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