[Lingtyp] query: how do ludlings apply to ideophones?

David Gil gil at shh.mpg.de
Thu Aug 27 17:01:35 UTC 2020


Dear all,


Does anybody have any data on whether and how ludlings apply to ideophones?

(Terminology: Ludlings, also known as language games, or secret 
languages, are specialized speech styles in which you do things like 
insert a [b] in every syllable, or reverse the order of syllables in a 
word.Ideophones are forms that appear to stand apart from the regular 
grammaticalrules and constraints of the language, both phonologically 
and in terms of their meanings which often contain an affective 
component; although most renowned from languages of West Africa and 
Mainland Southeast Asia, they are found in most or all languages.)

My prediction, which I would like to test, is that ideophones will be 
opaque to ludlings, that is to say, when applying to an utterance 
containing an ideophone, the ludling will "skip over" the ideophone and 
not apply to it.But of course I could be wrong ...

Elsewhere I have observed that in languages with (typically 
sentence-final) pragmatic particles, such particles are opaque to 
ludlings, and I used this to argue that such particles lie on a separate 
and largely suprasegmental tier to which the ludling does not apply.I 
would like to explore whether a similar argument might also be 
applicable to ideophones — hence this query.


Thanks,


David

-- 
David Gil
  
Senior Scientist (Associate)
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
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-556825895
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20200827/42dfa776/attachment.htm>


More information about the Lingtyp mailing list