This is interesting, but not restricted to ideophones; I’ve noticed that English gestures tend to start and end along with intonation groups, and “peak” at stressed syllables.

You are quite right, and this has been noted for gesture in general (McNeill 1992). What makes this piece of information interesting is that on the whole, expressives tend to come together with gestures more often than other words (e.g. ‘normal’ nouns or verbs).

I’ll let you know when I post the bit about expressive verbs in Tuareg. I’m looking forward to your Kwarandjie data!

Schlegel also observes that the gestures here are time-aligned with the speech they accompany

This is interesting, but not restricted to ideophones; I’ve noticed that English gestures tend to start and end along with intonation groups, and “peak” at stressed syllables.

expressive verbs in Tuareg

I’ve just lately been looking at something rather similar sounding in Kwarandjie, so I’m curious to hear more…

Yes, point taken about the lexical class / word class distinction. I agree that a language can have expressive (ideophonic) vocabulary without having a word class (in the grammatical sense) of expressives. In fact, I’ve been working on a post about expressive verbs in Tuareg, so Tuareg would be an example of a language of your third type (in which expressives occur as a lexical subclass within a word class).

As for the special symbols, I think they should display alright now even in the footnotes. I had forgotten to apply a special layout to them, thanks for pointing that out!