[Lingtyp] Ideophonic intonation

[Randy LaPolla]

David's post reminded me of something like that in Tagalog, where possibly any action word can be reduplicated with a particular tonal contour, LH HL to mean 'do a bit, do aimlessly', like lakad lakad 'take a stroll' (lakad 'walk, go'), kain kain 'eat a bit'. 

Randy
Sent from my iPhone

> On 23 Oct 2017, at 9:51 AM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi Laura, and everybody,
> 
> One very widespread case that is akin to what you're asking for is that of the ubiquitous utterance-final particles in languages of Southeast Asia.  In Malay/Indonesian, which is the language that I'm most familiar with, every dialect has an inventory of (almost always monosyllabic) utterance-final particles that crucially, can only occur with a very specific and distinctive intonation contour, which differs from one particle to another.  (It's almost like an island of tonality in an otherwise non-tonal language.)  These particles aren't traditionally considered to be ideophones; however, they share many properties with ideophones, albeit not reduplication.  Most importantly, they seem to lie outside the regular grammatical system of the language, belonging to a separate tier, as it were.  
> 
> A second, more specific case, involving both reduplication and a distinctive intonation contour, is found in Malay/Indonesian; this is what I would call "mocking reduplication".  Prototypically applied to a disyllabic name, though it can be applied to just about any word, the name is reduplicated/repeated, e.g. Budi Budi, with a very specific intonational pattern: L H: L L.  Its use is associated with gentle, often affectionate mocking or reproach.  (Oddly, I've heard what struck me as an almost identical intonation contour but without the distinctive semantics of the Malay/Indonesian construction at Barcelona airport, and it's probably much more widespread than that, where public address announcements begin with atención atención.)
> 
> David
> 
> 
> 
>> On 23/10/2017 02:14, Laura McPherson wrote:
>> Dear typology colleagues,
>> 
>> I am thinking about writing about ideophones in Seenku (Samogo, Northwestern Mande), and in particular about an ideophonic intonation pattern that I have seen with many different ideophones that I am calling "bouncing ball intonation". Briefly, it is characterized by repetition of the ideophonic stem/morpheme, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, like a bouncing ball coming to a stop.
>> 
>> Ideophones are of course often characterized by repetition (reduplication, retriplication) and by unusual prosody, but I am interested in published sources or other cases you know of where there is a larger fixed prosodic or intonational template that different ideophones can be slotted into and whether any meaning is associated with it.
>> 
>> Many thanks,
>> Laura
>> 
>> 
>> Laura McPherson
>> Assistant Professor of Linguistics
>> Dartmouth College
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> David Gil
> 
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
> 
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
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> 
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