‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

Dingemanse, Mark

doi:10.1075/ill.16.02din

Cited by 63 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Instead, they are spread across multiple classes including the adverbial, verbal and nominal-adjectival classes, of which the adverbial and verbal are the most common. As discussed in Akita (2017: 20-24), Japanese ideophones fit the cross-linguistic prototype defined by Dingemanse (2019). They form a large, open lexical class; they are marked by their phonotactic exceptionality (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…In linguistic typology, the term ideophone refers to 'a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery' (Dingemanse 2019; see also Blench 2010;Diffloth 1972;Hinton et al 1994). As depictive words, ideophones are prototypically iconic, meaning that there is a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For more on depiction see e.g Goodman (1968),Dingemanse (2011bDingemanse ( , 2019Diffloth's (1972) discussion of lexical discreteness.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Revising an implicational hierarchy for the meanings of ideophones, with special reference to Japonic

McLean

2020

Linguistic Typology

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An elicitation task was conducted with speakers of Japonic varieties to investigate whether stimuli of varying sensory modalities (e.g. audio, visual, tactile etc.) were more or less likely to elicit ideophones or iconic words. Stimuli representing sounds, movements, shapes and textures were most likely to elicit ideophones, and this is posited to reflect the relative ease or naturalness with which these domains can be mapped iconically to speech. The results mirror macro-level patterns of linguistic diversity, as these are also domains in which ideophones are most widely attested cross-linguistically. The findings call for the revision of a previously constructed implicational hierarchy for the semantic development of ideophone systems, adding to it the categories of FORM and TEXTURE as domains in which ideophones are most likely to develop, after SOUND and MOVEMENT. Independent evidence for the revised hierarchy comes from a semantic analysis of the elicited ideophones, where it was found that domains early in the hierarchy were more likely to be sources for semantic extension, while later domains were more likely to be targets. These findings are expected to be replicable for other languages, and offer exciting new directions for research into the semantic typology of ideophones.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Revising an implicational hierarchy for the meanings of ideophones, with special reference to Japonic

McLean

2020

Linguistic Typology

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“…Substantial numbers of iconic words are found in many of the world's languages, often in the form of an open lexical class of ideophones, but also scattered across the lexicon as sensory words that show phonaesthetic formmeaning associations (Nuckolls, 1999;Dingemanse, 2019). The marked phonology of iconic words has been connected to playful and expressive functions of language (Samarin, 1970;Zwicky & Pullum, 1987;Kunene, 2001;Haiman, 2014), and ideophones have been defined -only partly tongue-incheek -as "those words which are such fun to use" (Welmers, 1973).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playful iconicity: structural markedness underlies the relation between funniness and iconicity

Dingemanse

Thompson

2020

Lang. cogn.

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Words like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’, and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form–meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this association. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity that covary with funniness and iconicity ratings and that, we propose, serve as metacommunicative signals to draw attention to words as playful and performative. To assess the generalisability of the findings we develop a method to estimate lexical ratings from distributional semantics and apply it to a dataset 20 times the size of the original set of human ratings. The method can be used more generally to extend coverage of lexical ratings. We find that it reliably reproduces correlations between funniness and iconicity as well as cues of structural markedness, though it also amplifies biases present in the human ratings. Our study shows that the playful and the poetic are part of the very texture of the lexicon.

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“…Instead, it is the (potentially non-conventional) semiotic properties of depiction which are foundational to all acts of reported speech (not conventionalised syntactic properties). We suggest that recruiting Spronck and Nikitina's proposed definition of reported speech for a functional comparative concept (Haspelmath 2010;Croft 2016) ENACTMENT might offer a "modality-agnostic" (Dingemanse 2019; see also Okrent 2002) semiotic method for describing and comparing language-specific strategies for reporting self and others outside the current speech moment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%