Publications

Abstract

As lexicalized depictions, ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics) differ fundamentally from other words both in the kinds of meanings they represent and the ways in which they represent them. This can make them difficult to capture using traditional methods for language description and documentation. We review some of the new and experimental techniques that have been used to elicit, describe, and analyse ideophones, and discuss how these can be used to address some of the unique challenges ideophones pose. They include stimulus-based elicitation; multimodal folk definitions; hybrid modes of analysis (combining images and text); and new ways of compiling and presenting multimodal ideophone corpora. We also review psycholinguistic methods for exploring the sensory properties of words and the organisation of the lexicon, such as sensory ratings and similarity judgment tasks, and discuss how these can contribute to our understanding of ideophone lexicons. Crucial to our approach is the combination of insights from multiple sources, the exploitation of polysemiotic resources (combining multiple modes of meaning making), and the integration of etic and emic perspectives. The discussion is structured around three key challenges: collecting ideophones, unravelling their slippery semantics, and representing them in ways that do justice to their special semiotic properties. The days when ideophones were just footnotes in grammars are long past. With more and more researchers working to document ideophones in languages around the world, and increasing interest in iconicity from across the language sciences, now is an excellent time to rethink the toolkit of documentary linguistics to make sure it can optimally deal with language in all its semiotic diversity.

Abstract

This paper addresses the question why body-part terms are so often used to talk about other things than body parts. It is argued that the strategy of falling back on stable common ground to maximize the chances of successful communication is the driving force behind the selective advantage of body-part terms. The many different ways in which languages may implement this universal strategy suggest that, in order to properly understand the privileged role of the body in the evolution of linguistic signs, we have to look beyond the body to language in its socio-cultural context. A theory which acknowledges the interacting influences of stable common ground and diversified cultural practices on the evolution of linguistic signs will offer the most explanatory power for both universal patterns and language-specific variation.