delocutives

[Geoffrey Haig]

(My apologies if this message has already been distributed, I had some
trouble getting it out a couple of days back but given the amount of
interest in topic, I thought it send it one more time for good measure)

A couple of suggestions on data sources, and then some data from Turkish:

The Lingua-questionnaire grammars have a section on Ideophones, which might
provide a meager source of cross-linguistic data.

There is also the article by Zwicky & Pullum giving a very programmatic but
interesting perspective on the fundamental difference between morphology
used for this kind of purpose, and "plain" morphology:
Zwicky, A. and Pullum, G. 1987. Plain morphology and expressive morphology.
Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and
parasession on grammar and cognition. Edited by Beery, Natasha, Michaelis,
Laura & Filip, Hana, 330-340.

on Turkish:
 There is an unpublished MA thesis from Gerd Jendraschek (Semantische
Eigenschaften von Ideophonen im Türkischen, Uni Bielefeld, 2000) which has
some relevant data, some of the examples below are from this source.

Bound delocutive morphology is weakly present in Turkish (see below), though
more commonly either reduplication, or a construction with the gerund diye
(from demek 'say') is used:

Reduplication:
KuS pIr pIr uçtu

Gerund:
KuS pIr diye uçtu

'The bird flew (thereby) making a pIr noise' (pIr is sometimes written pIrr)

Note that both the gerund construction and reduplication are not solely
employed as delocutives, although the gerund comes closest to being solely
(and probably originally) used in this function.



The suffix -de/-da is sporadically used to create verbs from onomatopoeic bases:

SakIr-da-mak 'make a noise like SakIr'

However, most of the bases are largely conventionalised ideophonic
expressions; I doubt if spontaneous imitations resulting in novel strings
could be verbed in this manner. The origin of this suffix is unknown to me;
it might be treated in Erdal, M. 1991. Old Turkic word formation. A
functional approach to the lexicon (2 vols). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, but
given its limited productivity, it is not too likely.

For direct quotations of speech, the construction with diye is used.

sen diye hitap etti
"you" saying address he-did i.e. 'he addressed (me) in the "you form"' (er
hat mich geduzt)

It is possible that regular derivational morphology is recruited for
delocutive purposes. I heard a native speaker, commenting on the strange
habits of his German neighbours, with the newly coined verb taktaklaSmak.
This means 'say tak (<German 'Tag') to one another', and is formed by adding
the denominal suffix -lA plus the reciprocal suffix -S to the reduplicated base.

Cheers

geoff haig

------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Geoffrey Haig
Seminar für Allgemeine und 
Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft (SAVS),
Universität Kiel,
Olshausenstr. 40,
24098 KIEL.
Tel: (0431) 880 3314; Fax: (0431) 880 7405; 
Department administration: (0431) 880 2413