expressives

[Jess Tauber]

I've currently on hand a variety of papers and books dealing with
phonosemantic issues in SEAsia (and for that matter, from all over). Anyway,
specifically part of the text on White Hmong by Ratliff (so perhaps we could
talk about Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), articles by Diffloth and others on
Mon-Khmer languages, Matisoff on Tibeto-Burman, Blust, McCune and others on
Austronesian, various works on Tai languages, and Sinitic. Also got quite a
few dictionaries I've been drawing from, both expressives and normal
verb/adjectival vocabulary to compare phonosemantically. So while not fully
armed I can put up a reasonable fight.

As for the relationship between ideophone versus expressive, my own
experience is that the various phenomena are too diverse to neatly split
between two labels, and indeed, the boundary line between such forms and
normal vocabulary is both fuzzy and leaky, appearing to depend on typological
factors. Childs still is the best overall review I've read (in Sound
Symbolism, eds. Hinton, Ohala, Nichols, not necessarily in that order).
Still, for me, prototypical expressives/ideophones are a) generally
phonosemantically transparently organized, in that there is almost algebraic
method to their madness, b) outside normal syntax, and importable only
through combination with performative auxiliaries, where they act as either
object or adverbial in general.

Elaborate expressions, on the other hand, seem much more constrained areally
and typologically. You don't run much across them in African languages, nor
in Australia, New Guinea (but my data are sorely limited here), or the
Americas. Basque has 'em, as do various European IE and Uralic to a
relatively limited extent.  You only start to see really massive numbers once
you hit Indo-Aryan languages from Persian and Kurdish on out to the east,
Burushaski, Dravidian, Munda, Tibeto-Burman, and then including Turkic,
Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean and Japanese (and perhaps Nivkh and Ainu?) as
well as the usual more southerly grouping of Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien,
Mon-Khmer, and Austronesian, relative numbers petering out along the way.
Interestingly, from the limited materials I have, Andamanese does not seem to
participate in this broad areal assemblage.

Prof. Diffloth and I discussed this distribution a little ways back, and we
concluded that the center seems to be in India. Given that
ideophones/expressives, with relatively simple patterns of reduplication, are
found everywhere, but elaborate expressions more limitedly in an interesting
geographical pattern, one might be tempted to conclude that they are an
innovation, one which might have followed ancient cultural spread both
northwest into Europe and southeast into SEA.

One other area which might be thought of similarly, but perhaps independently
created, is that of the North American Pacific Northwest. Tsimshianic,
Salishan, Wakashan, Chemakuan, and a couple of Oregon Penutian languages
participate in this cluster. Very elaborate reduplicative derivations are
possible, with various infixes. Note this is also an area where there is
heavy use of augmentative/diminutive sound symbolic shifting, some of the
most elaborate in the world.

It seems to me that the various manipulations of phonology found in elaborate
expressions might be thought of as being built on top of a normal ideophonic
base. If there are really two layers we can deal with them separately.
Thoughts?

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com