Vivid sensory language: meaning and use of ideophones in a West-African society

Ideophones

Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events, like Siwu mukumuku ‘mumbling mouth movements’, nyenene ‘sensation of shivering’, and wiriwiri ‘small things dispersed in great numbers’. African, Asian and to a lesser extent Amerindian languages are known for their large inventories of ideophonic vocabulary. Previous studies of ideophones have focused almost exclusively on the form of ideophones to the neglect of their function. This has led to a situation in which we know a lot about their formal properties (phonology, morphology, sound-symbolism, syntax), but considerably less about their semantics and their actual use in discourse.

Focus on semantics and social interaction

The aim of my PhD project is to contribute to a holistic perspective on ideophony by integrating varied methodologies. In particular, I focus on two weak spots in our knowledge of ideophones: their semantics, which has been characterized as ‘rich’ yet ‘elusive’; and their use in natural discourse, an area in which there is virtually no previous research. The first is addressed with several types of controlled elicitation; the second with an extensive corpus of spontaneous conversational data.

Language, culture, and the perceptual world

My analysis situates ideophones in the grammatical and cultural ecology of Siwu while being sensitive to the perceptual world of the Mawu and their ways of attending to it. The leading question is When and why do Siwu speakers use ideophones? Lurking in the background is a larger, more fundamental question: why ideophony? Whence this spectacular elaboration of vivid sensory vocabulary in some languages? The perspective taken here contributes to this larger issue by providing a window into the workings of ideophony in discourse, the primordial home of communication.

Case study: Siwu

The primary data for my study comes from Siwu, a GTM language spoken in eastern Ghana. As a richly ideophonic language spoken in a relatively isolated, small-scale, rural community, Siwu provides the ideal context to observe and capture ideophones ‘in the wild’. A subgoal of the study is to contribute to the description of the Siwu language, focusing especially on those areas of the communicative system that remain underexposed in the unpublished sketch grammar by Ford & Iddah (1973).

See also

• A working definition of ideophones
• On the history of the term 'ideophone'
• Three misconceptions about ideophones
• Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries!

Other projects

• Language of Perception
• Ideophones and Sound-Symbolism
• Synaesthesia across cultures