Speaking the act

Kunene, Daniel P.

doi:10.1075/tsl.44.15kun

Cited by 21 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…(vi) Pragmatically, as they occur mainly in spoken discourses, ideophones tend to highlight the acoustic and visual dimensions of conversational exchanges (Clark, 2016), which notably contributes to their function as performances (Kunene, 2001;Dingemanse, 2012Dingemanse, , 2018Haiman, 2018). Frequently, ideophones are meant to cause a major engagement with the addressee, including contributing to the emotivity of the discourse (Baba, 2003).…”

Section: Ideophones: What They Are and Why They Have Been Regarded As...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution: The human self-domestication perspective

Di Paola,

Progovac,

Benítez-Burraco

2023

Preprint

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Language evolution studies are hindered by the circumstance that language does not fossilize, literally speaking. Nonetheless, different proxies or windows to language evolution have been posited, including the so-called linguistic “fossils,” i.e. aspects of present-day languages which can be regarded as approximations of early forms and uses of language. Among them, ideophones stand out as a particularly promising window because of their distinctive features, including their sound-symbolic nature, ample use of reduplication, reliance on the simplest possible combinatorial processes, attachment to emotional content, and presumed bootstrapping effects on language acquisition. It is of special relevance that these features of ideophones highlight their continuity with primate communication systems, including the reported co-occurrence with gestures. In addition to continuity with other species, our proposal also focuses on the role of ideophones in cross-modality and multi-modality, and on their interaction with the evolution of human brains, as envisioned in the framework of the human self-domestication (HSD) hypothesis, according to which humans evolved traits similar to those found in animal domesticates, including decreased reactive aggression. Our framework implicates the cortico-striatal brain networks, whose enhanced connectivity is a mechanism for the suppression of reactive aggression, via the enhanced cortical control of subcortical regions, but also a mechanism for cross-modality, and language processing more generally, via the enhancement of the dialogue among distant brain regions. Our main claim will be that, within this evolutionary framework, ideophones can be regarded not only as informative proxies or windows into the early stages in the evolution of human languages, but also as scaffolds supporting the evolution of more complex forms of language and cognition, just as they serve as useful scaffolds in child language acquisition.

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Section: Ideophones: What They Are and Why They Have Been Regarded As...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution: The human self-domestication perspective

Di Paola,

Progovac,

Benítez-Burraco

2023

Preprint

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“…So framing by means of foregrounding can point the listener towards a type of interpretation. Heuristics such as this one play an important role in language processing (Levinson 1995;Hutchinson & Gigerenzer 2005), as they enable the rapid comprehension that is critical in the realtime flow of conversation.…”

Section: A Simple Heuristic For Interpreting Repeated Talkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideophones and reduplication

Dingemanse

2015

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Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk with special reference to ideophones. To understand these phenomena, it is useful to distinguish two modes of representation in language -description and depiction -along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that help steer listener's interpretations from one to the other. Reduplication can partake in both modes, which is why it is common in ideophones and other areas of grammar. Using evidence from a range of languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk, and argues that both description and depiction are fundamental to understanding how language works.

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Ideophone

Stanlaw¹

2020

The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology

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Ideophones are words in a language that elicit an emotional response due to their synesthetic qualities or mimicry of natural sounds. Onomatopoeia in English, where a word tries to imitate a physical sound found in the environment (like a pig's oink oink or a clock's tick tock ), are examples. However, ideophones can evoke all kinds of other sensory responses besides sound: motion, colors, shapes, space, and – in some languages – mental states, feelings, or physical conditions. For example, zoku zoku in Japanese describes not just a shivering feeling due to cold, it also refers to being in a state of anxiety due to fear, joy, excitement, or repulsion.

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Speaking the act

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution: The human self-domestication perspective

Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution: The human self-domestication perspective

Ideophones and reduplication

Ideophone

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