Discussion on papers in 'Ideophones', Language

[Jess Tauber]

Hi. Since earlier postings mentioned recent and current resources to
peruse, perhaps now that people may have had time to read and digest some
of these we could discuss them here?

The 1999 Ideophones symposium in Koeln which led to the publication of the
book had a lot of discussion about pretty much all aspects of ideophone
behavior EXCEPT sound symbolic ones- it seemed to me that the organizers
(Voeltz, Kilian-Hatz) either didn't believe much in universality in this
area, or thought it irrelevant to the proceedings, despite the fact that
many of the authors included analysis and presentation of just this sort
of thing. I don't think any really clear overall consensus has emerged in
the years after the publication of the book of papers from the symposium.

And while the recent Language paper wasn't concerned with ideophones per
se, it might be of some interest to talk about the methological issues and
the "big picture" relevance of the results of the experiments.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net