One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850's the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones (nowadays called 'mimetics' in Japanese linguistics).

Back then, it was not very clear to Western grammarians that imitative words could imitate anything besides sound, and therefore our first source, Diego Collado's Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae, calls them "adverbia sonus" (it would be interesting to know whether Japanese words for the category itself —like giongo/gitaigo— already existed back then). Here's an excerpt from Collado 1632:

Aduerbia concludendi, & aduertendi

Aduerbia sonus sunt multiplicia secundum diuersitatem quam Iapones in sonus terminatione percipiunt, & illis, to, solent postponere: v.g. ua ua to xite, vociferando dicentes, ua ua, & si illis postponitur meqi, u, significat talem strepitum facere: v.g. ua meqi, u, va dicendo vociferor, aris, &c.

Adverbs that conclude and claim attention

The adverbs of sound (adverbia sonus) are many and vary in accordance with the way that the Japanese perceive the sound. The particle to is added to them; e.g., va va to xite 'vociferously saying wa wa,' and if they add meqi,u, it means to make even a louder noise; e.g., va meqi,u 'to shout saying wa.' [transl. by Richard Spear 1975]

According to Kimi Akita, who has kindly helped me to identify these constructions, the particle to can be identified with the quotative particle or complementizer, used in contemporary Japanese to introduce reported speech and adverbial ideophones. Collado's first example can thus be glossed as follows:

waawaa-to it-te

IDPH.bark-QUOT say-CONJUNCTIVE

'saying waawaa'

What Collado transcribes as 'meqi,u' can probably be identified with the verbalizer '-meku' which (according to Kimi Akita) is less productive nowadays. Kimi provides some interesting examples of lexicalized verbs derived from ideophones using this suffix:

(1) mimetic: kira-meku 'twinkle' (< kirakira), zawa-meku 'hum' (< zawazawa), hira-meku 'be inspired' (?< hirahira)
(2) nonmimetic (rare): haru-meku 'get like spring' (< haru 'spring'), huru-meku 'get old' (< huru-i 'old'), nazo-meku 'look mysterious' (< nazo 'mystery') [Kimi Akita p.c.]

Attaching this suffix to a monomoraic root like 'wa' is not allowed in Modern Japanese, notes Kimi.

Landresse 1825 [based on Rodrigues 1604]

But there is a fragment that is more interesting and that takes us even further back; it is found in Rodrigues's Arte da lingoa de Iapam. I have not been able to consult the original and am relying on an abridged French version published by Landresse in 1825. Here is what it has to say:

§81. Les Japonais ont un grand nombre d'adverbes dont ils se servent non-seulement pour exprimer les modifications d'une action, mais qui indiquent encore le son, le bruit, la position de la chose. (...) On forme encore un grand nombre d'adverbes par la répétition du même mot, pour exprimer la manière dont se fait une chose, ou le son de cette chose : comme farafara, bruit de la pluie ou des larmes qui tombent. (p. 87)

[my translation:] §81. The Japanese have a great number of adverbs which serve not only to express the manner of an event, but which also indicate the sound, the noise, the position of the thing. (...) A great number of these adverbs are formed by repetition of the same word, to express the manner in which a thing is done, or the sound of the thing : like farafara, 'sound of rain or of falling tears'

Here, we actually have a somewhat broader conception of the class — these adverbs are not mere imitations of sounds, they also express positions and manners. Moreover, we have a first morphological observation: many of them are reduplicated. Not all, mind you; most ideophone inventories known today do include a great deal of reduplicated words, but there are also plenty of morphologically simple roots. Incidentally, we've seen examples of both types before in the artful renditions of Kisi ideophones by Joanna Taylor: bákàlà-bákàlà 'the sound of big, fat raindrops' and bíààà 'rain softly falling'.

References

1. Collado, Diego. 1632. Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae. [Project Gutenberg e-text]
2. Spear, Richard L. 1975. Diego Collado's grammar of the Japanese language. Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas.
3. Rodrigues, João. 1825[1604]. Élémens de la grammaire japonaise [abridged from Arte da lingoa de Iapam] tr. et collationnés par C. Landresse. [With]. Trans. C. Landresse.

High time for a new issue of 'Ideophones around the web'. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick Cave's sound suits. Then, in English pop culture, the non-identity of ideophones and onomatopoeia is finally registering, thanks to bling. And finally, some word tasting notes on squee from Sesquiotica.

Sound Suits

One of the many sound suits by Nick Cave

Fiber-textile artist Nick Cave (once a professional dancer) makes fullbody "sound suits" from mixed materials (metal, fabric, buttons, hair, etc.) that make all sorts of noises when they're worn. They are the perfect blend of idiophone (self-sounding) and ideophone (idea-sounding) art. Art blog Beautiful/Decay features an interview with the artist.

Ideophones in pop culture

That rap makes for cutting-edge linguistic innovations isn't news — but who would've thought it would help to tear down the single most common misconception about ideophones? And yet it does, through the word bling. The thing with bling is that its not imitative of sound (its meaning is essentially visual, referring to the dazzling reflection of light), but that people still feel that the form fits the meaning very well. So people seem to feel that it's not onomatopoeic and look for a better term. Who was the first calling it an ideophone I don't know, but the Wikipedia entry does, and it is trickling down into popular media like Rolling Stone magazine:

Lil Wayne applied such lyrical impressionism to the crew's stock rims-and-grills material that he ended up coining a linguistic oddity known as an "ideophone": a word meant to convey a visual effect through an imaginary sound. In this case, that of light bouncing — or "blinging," if you will — off precious gems or metals.

Squee

Another recent coinage in pop culture is squee. James Harbeck's Sesquiotica has a very nice post about squee in the series "word tasting notes". Excerpt:

“Squee is a noise fangirls make,” Daryl said. “You know, anime fangirls, so excitable. It started out as onomatopoeia –” (“An ideophone,” Jess interjected) –”and has become a verb and a noun and probably an adjective too somewhere.” Ah, yes, the versatility of the English language — and of ideophones, which are words that have a performative aspect to them, like lickety-split, whoosh, and so on.

Actually, the whole of Sesquiotica is worth checking out — a place to go if you want to savour some words. I added it to the Ideophone blogroll. From the about page:

Words are delicious and intoxicating. They do much more than just denote; they have appearance, sound, a feel in the mouth, and words they sound like and travel with. All of these participate in the aesthetic experience of the word and can affect communication. So why not taste them like a fine wine?

Exactly. For some word tasting notes on Siwu ideophones, check out my Ideophone proeverij posts.

Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen's well-known book Talking Voices. Here is the pdf.

In the review I am slightly critical of this classic for three reasons. First of all, for a second edition of a work that appeared two decades ago, it is very thin on updates and revisions. Secondly, it still focuses on the acoustic signal only (thereby overlooking a wealth of work on gesture and multimodal interaction that appeared since the first edition). Third, despite its general claims, Talking Voices limits itself mainly to various Anglophone ways of speaking (excepting some Greek examples). The Greek examples (which derive from an interesting 1983 paper) actually point to the relevance of a widespread linguistic resource that happens not to be very common in either the Greek or the Anglophone cultures discussed: ideophony. I argue that ideophones are immediately relevant to 'repetition, dialogue, and imagery' (the subtitle of TV), and thus to core themes of Tannen's work (see also Nuckolls 1992, 1996).

Here is the conclusion:

The strength of Tannen’s book lies in its insightful analysis of the auditory side of conversation. Yet talking voices have always been embedded in richly contextualized multimodal speech events. As spontaneous and pervasive involvement strategies, both iconic gestures and ideophones should be of central importance to the analysis of conversational discourse. Unfortunately, someone who picks up this second edition is pretty much left in the dark about the prevalence of these phenomena in everyday face-to-face interaction all over the world.

Should Tannen have looked at gesture and ideophones? Of course every researcher has to make general choices and every published piece of scientific work is by definition incomplete. So I don't think there's an issue of 'should have' — but I do think it is unfortunate for the 2nd edition to miss out on these phenomena, because they would have offered many interesting and helpful illustrations of the book's themes.

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2010. Review of on Tannen, Deborah, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (2nd ed.). Language in Society, 39, 1, 139-140.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.
3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1996. Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. Tannen, Deborah. 1983. "I Take Out the Rock-Dok!": How Greek Women Tell about Being Molested (and Create Involvement). Anthropological Linguistics 25, no. 3: 359-374.
5. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd ed. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There's no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu ideophones in Dutch orthography!).

Klankschilderen: NRC, January 23, 2010, Science section, pp. 4-5

Nog meer goede pers! (30 januari)

Nog meer goede pers! Ik ben geïnterviewd door Dolf Jansen in de Radio 2 show Spijkers met Koppen (zie ook twitter). Met minder dan 10 minuten was het een kort interview, maar ik ben erg trots dat het Siwu het nu zelfs tot op de nationale radio geschopt heeft! Ik ben ook best tevreden met het verloop van het gesprek, hoewel er natuurlijk te weinig tijd is voor nuance. Maar oordeelt u zelf — klik op de speler hieronder om het fragment af te spelen.

[See post to listen to audio]

O, en voor de goede orde: (1) ik werk natuurlijk bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, niet bij de 'Universiteit van Nijmegen' zoals Felix Meurders zegt in de aankondiging; en (2) ideofonen zijn dus woorden (ik heb dit een paar keer gezegd maar het is kennelijk toch niet triviaal). Woorden die iedereen die Siwu spreekt kent en die je in een woordenboek kunt opnemen. Het zijn dus geen spontane geluidseffecten, het zijn ook geen tussenwerpsels, maar 'gewoon' woorden die eruit springen vanwege hun opvallende klanken en kleurrijke betekenissen.

Bulbul posted an interesting anecdote in a comment on one of my earlier posts:

On my way home today, I took the scenic route, through the old town, where the Weinachtsmarkt is in full swing with Christmas lights glowing, Glühwein flowing and all that jazz. As I was trying to get through the crowds, I noticed a black gentleman standing next to one of the stalls obviously admiring something and talking on the phone in a language I could not immediately identify.

And just as I passed him, he said “You know” and then something I would transcribe as “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” followed by a laugh. “I bet this ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ is an ideophone” I said to myself and immediately started wondering whether the person on the other end truly understood what was being conveyed – in other words, whether that “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” was a word with a shared meaning. Now I know better – assuming I was right in identifying the word as an ideophone, of course.

I still don’t know what language that was (I’m guessing Yoruba based on a few words I might have heard), so do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them as such?

Decide for yourself

So that's today's question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu.

I will not transcribe them at this point; I just want you to listen.

Example 1

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 2

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 3

[See post to listen to audio]

Well do they?

Now you're in the position to answer bulbul's question: do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them? The answer —mine at least— is yes. If you are a hearing person, I'm willing to bet you had no trouble at all identifying the ideophones in the above three sound samples.

Before I give you the transcriptions, it is worthwile to ponder for a moment why ideophones stand out like this. I've hinted at this on other occasions, for example yesterday's ditty on vivid suggestion, a post on Feedburner's Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk!, and the last ideophone proeverij; and also in a recent paper, where I wrote:

As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were.

So ideophones stand out for a reason: to attract attention to themselves as words qua words, to mark themselves as depictions in a stream of descriptive material. Let's suppose the gentleman overheard by Bulbul was indeed using an ideophone. Standing at the Weinachtsmarkt, he was attempting to share a vivid image of something he had in mind with the person on the other end; to do so, he needed to signal that what followed 'You know' was different somehow from bland referential prose; and this he did (unwittingly for sure) by performatively foregrounding 'ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ'.

Of course it's a bit flaky to draw conclusions on the basis of a couple of syllables overheard on a Weinachtsmarkt. Was it Nigerian Pidgin, which we know has lots of ideophones (Faraclas 1996)? Was he codeswitching? Was he perhaps simply stuttering? There's no way of knowing. That's why I gave the Siwu examples, which come from an extensive corpus of everyday social interaction. Want to know what those mean? Click 'Show' below to check it out.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.
2. Faraclas, Nicholas. 1996. Nigerian Pidgin. New York: Routledge.

On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users' sensitive feeling for language, a deep sensitive attachment to sounds and their power of vivid suggestion or representation. In many cases, a speaker or oral artist can avoid an ideophone by simply duplicating a word of action: for jegidezie tiii, for instance, the narrator could have said jegide jegide, which would translate into something like 'walked on and on.' But tiii has a special appeal both as a sound and as a more dramatic way of capturing the idea of extent.

Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature, 1992 p. 96. (The example is from Ijo.)

Okpewho's remarks highlight the importance of the material properties of the ideophonic word. It is not a simple case of having words for things that some other languages may not have lexicalized words for; it is the nature of the ideophonic word —the fact that meaning is suggested by the material properties of the sign— that makes it such a significant linguistic device. What Okpewho calls 'vivid suggestion' I have tried to capture with the phrase 'vivid depiction' in my working definition of ideophones ("marked words that vividly depict sensory events").

References

1. Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Slides for my recent paper 'Ideophones in unexpected places', presented at LDLT2 in London, November 13-14. Though the inquisitive rooster in the title slide may not be looking for them, there are ideophones for just about any salient feature depicted in this scene. But what are people using them for? And what specialized uses may arise out of the core interactional functions of ideophones? Those are the questions addressed in this paper.

Supplementary material can be found on another page. A slightly updated version of the full paper is available here (PDF). Here is how to cite it:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-94. London: SOAS.

In their commentary on Evans & Levinson's recent hotly debated Myth of Language Universals paper, Pinker & Jackendoff briefly mention ideophones — and erroneously shelve them away as 'response cries':

English, for example, has phenomena similar to Chinese classifiers (e.g., a piece of paper, a stick of wood), Athabaskan verb distinctions (among locative verbs; Levin 1993; Pinker 1989; 2007), ideophones (response cries such as yum, splat, hubba-hubba, pow!; Goffman 1978), and geocentric spatial terms (e.g., north, upstream, crosstown; Li & Gleitman 2002)

It is about time I wrote another installment of misconceptions about ideophones. It seems this error is a particularly easy one to make for speakers of SAE languages. In this post I want to flesh out why this might be so, and explain what's the difference.

Goffman on response cries

So why are ideophones not response cries? Let's have a look at Goffman (1978) first:

We see such 'expression' [i.e. response cries, MD] as a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feeling, a bursting of normal restraints, a case of being caught off-guard. (p. 800)

A response cry is (if anything is) a ritualized act in the ethological sense of that term. Unable to shape the world the way we want to, we displace our manipulation of it to the verbal channel, displaying evidence of our alignment to the on-going events; the display takes the condensed, truncated form of a discretely-articulated, non-lexicalized expression. (p. 801)

Now Goffman is a little too simplistic here about response cries (also known as interjections) — for they may well be lexicalized expressions and they may well have a communicative function beyond a 'natural overflowing' (Ameka 1992, Kockelman 2003). But that's another issue; my worry here is with the common confusion of ideophones and interjections. Pinker and Jackendoff are not the first to confuse the two. And the two classes are indeed superficially similar in a number of ways: both often have marked phonotactics and both seem somehow tied to the here and now (Ameka 1992:112-113). But the main reason for the confusion lies, I think, in the fact that both are perceived to be 'about' emotions and sensations in one way or another.

Ideophones are not responses

It is in the nature of this 'aboutness' that the distinction between ideophones and interjections can be seen most clearly. Interjections index speaker’s stances to events in the immediate context of the speech event, very much like direct reactions (cf. Goffman's description). I drop a vase and say, 'Oops!'; you pick up the pieces, cut yourself and say, 'Ouch!' Those are prototypical examples of response cries.

Now imagine ideophones being like that. This evokes visions of speakers of ideophonic languages looking at the world in utter bewilderment, emitting response cries at trees shaking in the wind, a closely woven basket, ants swarming on their anthill, a smooth river stone, turtles lumbering across the road, a rough mud wall, flour finely ground, a person sitting timidly. Kpakpakpakpakpa! Sinisinisini! Ɣeee! Pɔlɔpɔlɔpɔlɔ! Kpokolo-kpokolo! Wòsòròò! Dɛkpɛrɛɛɛɛ! Kpììì! (All of these, incidentally, are proper Siwu ideophones.) What a rich mental life must these natives have!

Do I need to spell it out? That is not what speakers do with ideophones. I need scarcely remind you that some languages have ideophone inventories going into the thousands . What on earth would people need so many response cries for?

Perhaps the difference between interjections and ideophones is best explained in semiotic terms. In a Peircean framework, interjections have a strong indexical component; they are literally rooted in the here and now, associated to it by contiguity (Kockelman 2003). Ideophones do not index events so much as recreate them through depiction (various types of form-meaning mappings); so their mode of signification is more iconic.

Interactional functions of ideophones

Fine, you say, so they are different. But what do speakers do with these words, if they're not response cries? A core interactional function of ideophones is the creation of heightened interlocutory involvement (Nuckolls 1992; Kunene 2001; Dingemanse 2009). As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were. (Compare the use of iconic gestures by a good narrator.) As Siwu speakers themselves put it, ‘you use these words to capture the attention’, ‘we use them to guide the mind to more understanding’, and ‘they make stories more interesting.’

Moreover, ideophones are also used during joint activities (e.g. the making of gunpowder, pressing palm oil, building mud houses), where their highly specific, sensory semantics allows collaborators to quickly and precisely converge on a shared understanding of the processes and of the state of the materials they are handling. In this context, ideophones are used as a 'precision tool' as it were. (Imagine using response cries for this. 'Ouch! Now you hit my hand. Move back. Yuck! You made it all pulpy! Oops! I dropped the hammer' — Nah, it wouldn't work.) Ideophones, in short, are a vivid and versatile communicative workhorse, well integrated in everyday social interaction and in the linguistic system.

If you're interested to learn more about how ideophones are actually used in everyday discourse, feel free to check out my paper on 'ideophones in unexpected places' or come and hear me talk about the use of ideophones in joint activities at the AAA meeting in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks.

References

1. Ameka, Felix K. 1992. Interjections: The Universal Yet Neglected Part of Speech. Journal of Pragmatics 18, no. 2-3: 101-118.
2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. Ideophones in unexpected places. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.   (PDF)
3. Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429-492.
4. Goffman, Erving. 1978. Response Cries. Language 54, no. 4 (December): 787-815.
5. Kockelman, Paul. 2003. The Meanings of Interjections in Q’eqchi’ Maya: From Emotive Reaction to Social and Discursive Action. Current Anthropology 44, no. 4: 467-497.
6. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
7. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Paris.
8. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.
9. Pinker, Steven, and Ray Jackendoff. 2009. The reality of a universal language faculty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 465-466. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09990720.  
10. Samarin, William J. 1971. Survey of Bantu ideophones. African Language Studies 12: 130-168.

LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I'm looking forward to plenaries by Larry Hyman and Tania Kuteva, and to many other interesting talks.

The very last slot on Saturday (17:00-17:30) is reserved for a paper titled 'Ideophones in unexpected places' by yours truly. I am still considering my options for keeping the audience awake, but meanwhile, you can download a short version of the paper or have a peek at the accompanying multimedia (audio samples of two dirges).

In a nutshell, the argument I'm going to make is that ideophones occur across a wide range of discourse genres, some of them well beyond narrative contexts of use. Taking two ‘unexpected’ genres, funeral dirges and greetings, I show that the use of ideophones in each of them is distinctive while at the same time building on core interactional functions of ideophones in everyday conversational discourse.

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. Paper for LDLT2, SOAS, London, November.

 

Intangible and abstruse

the bright silk of the sunlight

Pours down in manifest splendor,

You can neither stroke

the precise word with your hand

Nor shut it down under a box-lid.

Tsze Sze's Second Thesis
Ezra Pound, The Unwobbling Pivot, 1947

 

Taro Gomi said: "So linguists do not deal with onomatopoeic expressions. Or perhaps I should say, they are unable to deal with them. And this is not surprising; onomatopoeic expressions are not the kind of subject matter that expert linguists can take up as a separate topic and study academically. After all, onomatopoeic expressions are not really language; they are, in a sense, raw language."