Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics) are marked sound-symbolic words that vividly evoke perceptions and sensations. As a distinct word class, ideophones are found abundantly in Asian, African and Amerindian languages but are rare in Indo-European languages. Straddling boundaries that have long been considered self-evident in Western thought (such as perception vs. emotion, or the traditional five-senses model), ideophones provide a unique view of cultural meaning systems relating to perception and sensation.

World Ideophone Survey

The goal of the World Ideophone Survey (WIS) is to arrive at a generally applicable analysis and classification of this complex phenomenon using an approach inspired by the ideas of Canonical Typology. We aim at identifying features of the ideophonic phenomenon across languages, with prototypic cases and ranges of variation, allowing not only a coarse two or three level classification of languages as having (or not) ideophones, but a multidimensional assessment of each language individually.

This, in turn, leads to the second goal of the project, which is to provide a comprehensive database of ideophonic phenomena in as many languages as possible, including not only prototypically ideophonic languages but also cases which are not so clear-cut. To this end, we will employ a web-based questionnaire (a paper-and-pencil version is also available) through which specialists in different languages will be able to provide data concerning ideophonic phenomena in their languages.

After enough data points have been collected in the WIS database, we will conduct various analyses, also in connection to the Language & Genes project. We hope that the WIS database will offer not only an invaluable resource for linguists and psychologists interested in the ideophonic phenomena but will also allow a better understanding of the origins and dynamics of ideophones.

PhD projects

• Semai expressives: A view into language of perception (Sylvia Tufvesson)
• The linguistic and cultural ecology of ideophones in Siwu (Mark Dingemanse)

Researchers

• Sylvia Tufvesson
• Dan Dediu
• Mark Dingemanse