expressives/elaborate expressions

[Jess Tauber]

One thing I've noticed is that besides the "Indian"-style reduplication
pattern, which often substitutes in the reduplicant a labial (and less often
some other position) for one of the C's in the original root for pejorative
connotation, there is also a more partilculary SEA reduplication pattern,
where a bisyllable X Y becomes X X Y Y. In languages where I've seen it it
appears to convey a trivializing sense. I haven't run across it anywhere
else. Just remembered John Haiman wrote me a while back about preferences in
the region for rhyme versus alliteration which seem to correlate with
constituent order preferences, which help explain which part of a root
reduplicant gets altered, which stays the same.

A question I have about one unexplored area within the elaborate expression
department: Are substitutions random, or is there some pattern to them, some
covert semantics involved? Mechanical phonological forces? Mere stylistics?
Obviously where there is less choice this doesn't much matter.

Another area worthy of consideration is their productivity. Are they mere
fossils of some bygone era, or actively coined living things. Is there any
areal patterning to this? Ideophone specialists in Africa have sometimes said
that the forms in question are created on the spot, but how much
lexicalization has their been, and if there has been, how much historical
change can we observe?

Crosslinguistically, in many language families I've seen evidence for
relationship between expressive/ideophonic forms and regular lexical roots.
Indeed, several speakers at the Cologne ideophone symposium noted what seemed
to be "smoking guns", languages caught in the act of incorporating these
forms into the verb lexicon. Childs, on the other hand, votes for the reverse
process. Is there any evidence in SEA for this? Lexical roots in SEA seem to
show various levels of analyzable phonosemantics, such as found in roots with
final labials in Tai languages. Not every root fits the pattern, but enough
do to get a general sense out of the system. Sinitic final labials show a
clear but weak patterning as well- even in reconstructions of the parent
language one can see this, indicating great age.

How phonosemantically transparent themselves are SEA expressives? How much is
old, and presumably opaque, affixation of grammatical or lexical material?
What about the patterns themselves- are they the same from language to
language or from family to family, or is there significant language-specific
variation?

Phonosemantic phenomena have been claimed to be eminently areal in nature.
How borrowable are the sets of forms, or the patterns underlying them? Can we
trace a cline across SEA? Does this follow any typological lines?

What about usage? Do citified, educated folks drop these forms from their
palette, or are they relegated to certain artistic genres?

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com