[Lingtyp] R: A "Swadesh List" of Ideophone semantic categories

Tue Mar 19 18:10:35 UTC 2019

As a contribution to the ideophones discussion I’m attaching a very interesting article by the ethnolinguist Maurizio Gnerre which will appear in the next issue of  the “Archivio Glottologico Italiano” (a monographic issue dedicated to ‘deixis’)

Paolo

Da: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] Per conto di Martin Haspelmath
Inviato: martedì 19 marzo 2019 18:55
A: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Oggetto: Re: [Lingtyp] A "Swadesh List" of Ideophone semantic categories

Jeffrey Heath makes a very important point here. It's easy to think of a typical exemplar of an ideophone, and this is so different from other types of words that the special term "ideophone" seems useful. But exemplar-based concepts give us subjective stereotypes, not comparative concepts that can be used for objective cross-linguistic comparison. 

There are other terms of this kind in linguistics ("word", "clitic", "agglutination", "agreement") – they seem useful because everyone can think of a salient exemplar, but they are undefined, so we cannot really use them for quantitative cross-linguistic comparison.

(The only definition of "ideophone" that I could think of is "obligatorily duplicated forms that can be used as adverbials" – this would include the most typical cases, and would exclude cases like Greek sighá-sighá 'slowly', because sighá on its own is possible as well, if I remember correctly. The definition would exclude many of the cases included by Dingemanse, of course.)

Martin

On 19.03.19 12:07, Heath Jeffrey wrote:

How do you define "ideophone"? Are English verbs twinkle and sputter ideophones? Are onomatopoeias ideophones? What about adjectival intensifiers like brand in brand new?

There is no cross-linguistically applicable grammatical definition of this concept, i.e. with necessary and sufficient morphosyntactic properties. Dingemanse's universal definition of ideophones is, for good reason, limited to the convergence of phonological and semantic markedness. Both of these are intrinsically vague and subjective. His definition makes no mention of morphosyntactic properties. In specific languages, morphosyntactically valid word-class categories often include some (intuitively) ideophone-like stems along with some (intuitively) non-ideophone-like stems, and exclude other (intuitively) ideophone-like stems. For example, onomatopoeias (sometimes claimed to be the universal bedrock of ideophones) often constitute a morphosyntactic class of their own, distinct from the class containing many (intuitively) ideophone-like stems. So there is no universal core for ideophone, comparable to that often claimed for adjective or numeral.

Any crosslinguistic survey of ideophone semantics or phonology, even if limited to West Africa, will have to wrestle with the vagueness of the concept. 

  _____  

From: Lingtyp  <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Johann-Mattis List  <mailto:mattis.list at lingulist.de> <mattis.list at lingulist.de>
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2019 5:47 AM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] A "Swadesh List" of Ideophone semantic categories 

I'd recommend all of you to see if the concepts you want to use there
appear (already) in Concepticon at https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fconcepticon.clld.org <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fconcepticon.clld.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C2da20e444a544c06124008d6ac4feb60%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636885856584198686&sdata=q158Ogy4Tt9jd78oRc8wYeFa9kPTNDlHsbG7Au9jwP0%3D&reserved=0> &data=02%7C01%7C%7C2da20e444a544c06124008d6ac4feb60%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636885856584198686&sdata=q158Ogy4Tt9jd78oRc8wYeFa9kPTNDlHsbG7Au9jwP0%3D&reserved=0. If not,
and you publish your list, we'll gladly add them, if they are not too
idiosyncratic, but I'd expect they won't if you go for cross-linguistic
studies as a goal.

Best,

Mattis

On 19/03/2019 10.32, Françoise Rose wrote:
> Hi Ian,
> 
> Here is a list of general actions or states that are expressed (often
> more specifically) by Teko ideophones and that do not seem to fit in
> your current list.
> 
>  
> 
> Blowing
> 
> Be dark
> 
> Closed eyes / Open eyes
> 
> Grimace
> 
> Snoaring
> 
> Tearing
> 
> Entering /exiting
> 
> Winking
> 
> Shooting
> 
> Falling
> 
> Slip
> 
> Jumping
> 
> Go up/down
> 
> Push
> 
> Bubbles
> 
>  
> 
> You can read about Teko ideophones in my grammar. P. 400-409
> 
> Ros  Rose, Françoise. /Grammaire de l’émérillon Teko, Une Langue
> Tupi-Guarani de Guyane Française/. Langues et Sociétés d’Amérique
> Traditionnelle 10. Louvain: Peeters, 2011.
> 
>  
> 
> Very best,
> 
> Françoise
> 
>  
> 
> *De :* Lingtyp  <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *De la part
> de* Joo Ian
> *Envoyé :* mardi 19 mars 2019 09:20
> *À :* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> 
> *Cc :* caroljuan27 at gmail.com <mailto:caroljuan27 at gmail.com> ; mariaflax at gmail.com <mailto:mariaflax at gmail.com> 
> *Objet :* [Lingtyp] A "Swadesh List" of Ideophone semantic categories
> 
>  
> 
> Dear all,
> 
>  
> 
> I am currently trying to make a list of semantic categories of
> ideophones, in order to do a cross-linguistic comparison (for example,
> do ideophones whose meanings are related to brightness show similarity
> across different languages?)
> 
>  
> 
> Here’s my list so far, created out of my intuition and previous literature.
> 
> I wonder if you have any meanings that you would like to add to or
> remove from the list.
> 
> The goal is to make a list of ideophone meanings so that most languages
> that have a sizeable ideophone inventory would have at least several
> ideophones that belong to each category.
> 
>  
> 
> *Semantic Categories*
> 
> Air
> 
> Anxiety
> 
> Bright
> 
> Clean
> 
> Clear-cut/Vivid
> 
> Crying
> 
> Dirty/Messy
> 
> Dry
> 
> Eating/Drinking
> 
> Fast
> 
> Flow
> 
> Friction
> 
> Hitting/Beating
> 
> Hungry/Thirsty
> 
> Laughter
> 
> Looking
> 
> Plenty
> 
> Ringing
> 
> Ripping/Cutting
> 
> Romantic
> 
> Rotation
> 
> Rough
> 
> Rupture
> 
> Scattering
> 
> Secretly
> 
> Shaking/Vibration
> 
> Slow/Lazy
> 
> Soft
> 
> Solid
> 
> Speaking
> 
> Stop
> 
> Walking/Running
> 
> Wet
> 
>  
> 
> I would appreciate any comments or advices.
> 
>  
> 
> From Seoul,
> 
> Ian
> 
>  
> 
> 
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> )
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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D-07745 Jena  
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik 
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