Category Archives: Sound symbolism

Sound symbolism, loosely defined here as motivated linkage of sound and meaning, is a salient property of expressive vocabulary in many languages.

Phonosemantics, Chinese characters, and coerced iconicity

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The light descending (from the sun, moon and stars.) To be watched as component in ideograms indicating spirits, rites, ceremonies.The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently on the topic of phonosymbolism, phonosemantics, and Chinese characters. It started with a post by Victor Mair over at Language Log, outlining several approaches to “etymologizing” Chinese characters. A follow-up by David Branner highlighted some of the problems with simplistic notions of phonosymbolism. Here I add some texture to the conversation by discussing the views of Ezra Pound, making a comparison to form-meaning mappings in ideophones, and introducing the notion of coerced iconicity.

The posts by Mair and Branner address a popular but quite mistaken notion: the idea that Chinese characters are like little pictures whose meaning can be “read off” from the strokes. The academic best known for debunking this popular misconception was John DeFrancis in his (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. He showed that the bulk of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds in which one element indicates (at most) a general category of meaning and the other suggests the pronunciation.

The pictorial view

The roots of the “pictorial” view of Chinese characters in the Western world no doubt go far back. One of the driving forces behind it in the first half of the 20th century was the poet Ezra Pound. Pound is a fascinating figure, famed for his influence as a Modernist, Imagist poet and literary critic (and controversial for some of his political views). I have recently described Pound’s ideas about Chinese ideograms:

Over the years, Pound developed a fascination with the poetic affordances of logographic writing systems, especially Chinese. This fascination originated with his discovery of a theory of the Chinese character by Ernest Fenollosa [published in an edition by Pound in 1920], who argued that Chinese writing reflects etymology (‘true sense’) in a way that phonetic writing does not. In Pound’s idealist view of etymology (Li 1986), this rendered the Chinese character vastly superior to Western phonetic script in terms of picture-making. Soon enough however, scholarly studies of logographic writing systems showed that Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds rather than transparent pictures, and Pound’s idyllic conception of Chinese characters as evocative ideograms was severely and justly criticized (Kennedy 1958; cf. DeFrancis 1984).

(Dingemanse 2011:44-45)

In my paper (titled Ezra Pound among the Mawu and published in Semblance and Signification), Pound’s ideas serve as a cautionary tale. I argue that there is a parallel between Pound’s overeager “iconicization” of Chinese characters and the tendency of many linguists to ascribe iconicity to ideophones. One important point of the paper is to note that there are limits to the iconic representational powers of speech, and there is reason to be careful in ascribing iconicity to ideophones (p. 45-6).

Ideophones are not the unproblematically imitative words that many people have made them out to be. There is something about them that makes us want to believe this, no doubt — just like there is something about Chinese characters that makes us want to believe the pictorial story. In my analysis of ideophones, this something is not iconicity, but first and foremost their depictive nature — the fact that they are presented as, or to use a more apt metaphor, framed as depictions.

Three types of form-meaning mappings

It may be useful to describe the development of my own thinking about these matters. Back in 2007 my reading of the ideophone literature suggested that ideophones are simply sound-symbolic words. Over time, with my inventory of Siwu ideophones steadily growing and my grasp of the semiotics of depiction in speech slowly evolving, I came to question simplistic notions of sound symbolism and iconicity in ideophones.

It became clear to me, for instance, that in a language with thousands of ideophones, it would be very difficult for all ideophones to be iconic to the same degree or in the same way. So there had to be different types of iconicity — different ways in which ideophones could evoke sensory imagery. My paper addressed this matter empirically by surveying the Siwu ideophone inventory. The result of this survey was a description of three basic, non-exclusive types of form-meaning mappings in ideophones.

Coerced iconicity

While working on this I also realized that even if we allow for different types of iconic mappings, certain ideophones do not actually seem to be that transparently iconic. How does one iconically map colours, internal sensations, or cognitive states? Is iconicity really the point of ideophones like Siwu fùrùfùrù ‘seeing things in a blur’ or Japanese iya iya ‘with a heavy heart’? It seems unlikely. Have ideophone enthusiasts (native speakers as well as linguists) simply been over-eager in iconicizing ideophones? Doing an Ezra Pound in the domain of sound? If so, it is important to figure why the form of ideophones is so often identified with their meaning. I argue that it is their depictive nature:

Depiction, rather than iconicity, is what invites people to treat the ideophone as a performance of sensory imagery. An analogy may help to explain this point. Consider the category of objects called paintings. Paintings vary quite widely in the degree to which they are iconic (i.e. show a perceived resemblance to what they depict). And yet there is a distinct interpretive frame we bring to all of them: we tend to view them as depictions rather than read them as texts (Gombrich 2002[1960]; Walton 1973). In a similar way, we may think of ideophones as setting up a depictive interpretive frame, inviting the listener onto the scene and invoking images of being there.
(…)
If we want to invoke iconicity here at all, we should call it COERCED ICONICITY. The depictive nature of the ideophone coerces us into treating the word as an adequate rendition of the depicted event.

(Dingemanse 2011:51)

Coerced iconicity may be a useful concept in discussions of supposed iconicity because it describes a mechanism familiar to us all and realistically locates it in the eye of the beholder. In Peircean terms, it locates iconicity in the interpretants of eager observers rather than solely in properties of the sign-object relationship. Why was it difficult for Pound to resist associating meaning with the shape of Chinese characters? Why does the pictorial view of Chinese characters, thoroughly debunked as it is, keep coming back? One reason may be that there is some amount of truly pictorial characters that feed the imagination and that makes all Chinese characters look like pictures, especially to the untrained eye. This coerces people into treating all characters as pictorial renditions. Why do speakers treat all ideophones as perfectly adequate depictions of sensory imagery? Perhaps all that is needed is a critical mass of transparently iconic ideophones (using the three principles I described), and for the remainder, the framing devices of performative prosody and expressive morphology may be enough to coerce people into treating them as good depictions.

Explanatory leakage

Sapir famously said that all grammars leak. Much the same holds for any grand theory of how linguistic signs —spoken as well written words— are motivated. (This is the source of my unease with the “big picture” theory of Chinese phonosymbolism by Howell that Mair outlines in his post.) All linguistic systems are the messy, fuzzy products of a long term interaction of human communicative needs, intersubjective language use, modality-specific features, and the mindless opportunism of evolution (among other factors). In the case of the form and meaning of ideophones, there are many forces tugging at them and shaping them. Although many people like to think of ideophones as prototypically “iconic” words, on reflection, it is clear that the story leaks. Yes, there are clearly iconic structures in ideophones that help guide the imagination, perhaps somewhat like the lines and shading in a naturalistic painting. But some ideophones (many in some languages?) may be more like abstract paintings: depictions that are invested with meaning by eager observers, not necessarily on the basis of information contained within their form.

Often a certain amount of explanatory leakage is more exciting than a neat account. Seeking regularity all the way leads to oversimplification. In some possible world, all Chinese characters are neat pictograms, the Chinese language is phonosemantic in nature, and all ideophones are nice imitative words. This world is not ours however; and isn’t it is far more interesting to investigate the manifold ways in which humans can do cross-modal mappings of form to meaning, and to describe the different processes by which they discern motivation in what to the analyst may look like arbitrary gibberish? Gibberish. Hmm, let me frame that word for you so that you can experience some coerced iconicity on the way out. Gibberish.

References

  1. DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. ‘Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and Iconicity in Siwu’. In Semblance and Signification, edited by Pascal Michelucci, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg, 39-54. Iconicity in Language and Literature 10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (download here)
  3. Dingemanse, Mark. (in press) “Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass.
  4. Fenollosa, Ernest. 1920. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Edited by Ezra Pound. London: Stanley Nott.
  5. Kennedy, G. 1958. ‘Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character’. Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5: 24–36.
  6. Li, Victor P. H. 1986. ‘Philology and Power: Ezra Pound and the Regulation of Language’. boundary 2 15, no. 1/2: 187-210.
  7. Pound, Ezra. 1947. The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest. New York: New Directions.

Ideophones around the web: ideophones and product naming

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This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from an Indian software startup.

I’d noticed long ago that the domain “ideophone.com” was registered by a domain name squatter, and I wondered whom they thought would be interested. A videophone company perhaps? Anyway that particular domain has been lying dormant for years now with one of those useless “what you need when you need it” templates on it.

Recently however a real company called “ideophone” has entered the scene: Ideophone.in. The people at Ideophone.in make mobile apps for commuting people — “redefining commute”, as they say themselves, with mobile apps that are journey- and location-aware. Some cool things about this company are the multilingual people behind it — they speak Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Hindi — and the fact that their product names are inspired by ideophones.

Ideophonic apps

One of the products of this company is a digital metering app which shows time and distance travelled during rikshaw and taxi rides. Here’s what Sundar writes about the name of this app:

It sounded like a neat idea to name the app with an ideophone. It’ll evoke the same impression in people speaking different languages, right?

Given that the bulk of the Bangalore population speaks some Dravidian language or other, the choice fell on Suruk, which connoted diligence, speed, sharpness etc. signifying what Suruk does. And, it helped that www.suruk.com was available.

Product naming isn’t exactly my expertise (for that, I look to Fritinancy), but it is certainly not a bad idea to use ideophones to name your products. In fact the use of sound-symbolism in product names is quite a thing nowadays, with researchers from marketing and (psycho)linguistics weighing in on the issue (Klink 2001, Lowrey et al. 2007, Yorkston & Menon 2004). And with the linguistic sophistication displayed by the people behind Suruk, Pyka, and other apps, Ideophone is certainly a nice name for the company itself.

The good people at Ideophone.in credit this blog for inspiration. Folks, I’m surely happy to be of help, and I salute you! I’m looking forward to your new products. Meanwhile, if you want some ideophones, check out my thesis!

References

  1. Klink, R.R. 2001. “Creating meaningful new brand names: A study of semantics and sound symbolism.”
  2. Lowrey, T.M., and LJ Shrum. 2007. “Phonetic symbolism and brand name preference.” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (3): 406.
  3. Yorkston, E., and G. Menon. 2004. “A sound idea: Phonetic effects of brand names on consumer judgments.” Journal of Consumer Research: 43–51.

Daniel Tammet invents his own Siwu ideophone

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I loved Daniel Tammet’s Born On A Blue Day, in which he tells of his life with autistic savant syndrome. His second book, Embracing The Wide Sky (2009), is just as enthralling. In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds”. To my great delight, I discovered that it even indirectly (okay, very indirectly) features my work on Siwu ideophones!

One of the chapters of the book is on language, covering topics from Greenberg’s universals to psycholinguistic research on language acquisition and from aphasia to sound symbolism. The section on sound symbolism, onomatopoeia and phonestesia contains a survey “to test your own intuitive sense for word meanings”. That little survey is proving quite popular online: copies have appeared on dozens of websites (just search for siwu pambalaa and you’ll see what I mean). Here’s how it starts:

Test your own intuitive sense for word meanings from a range of languages with the following multiple-choice questions:

1. Does the adjective ‘pambalaa’ in the Siwu language of Africa describe (a) a round, fat person or (b) an angular, thin person?

That’s right! The first question features “the Siwu language of Africa” — the Ghanaian language that I have been studying —and writing about— as a field linguist since 2007. The question was probably inspired by my online writings; this website has featured a lot of Siwu examples through the years. (This post may be the source.)

No pambalaa in Siwu…

Now here’s the funny thing: there is no Siwu word pambalaa. The word just doesn’t exist. But rather than taking Daniel to task for spreading misinformation about Siwu, I want to argue that his ‘misremembering’ illustrates exactly what is so interesting about this kind of words, known in linguistics as ideophones.

First things first though. How do I know that this word is not actually an existing word in Siwu? The answer is that I checked. I have a list of hundreds of ideophones in Siwu, and it isn’t on there. It’s also in none of my publications so far, on or offline. Additionally, I asked several speakers of Siwu, and they tell me that the word doesn’t exist, though there are some words that are like it (that were indeed on my list, and in my publications): pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu.

Now pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu all have to do with something round and protruding, though varying in magnitude. This kind of pattern is familiar to ideophone aficionado’s. In my thesis, I have called it “relative iconicity”; it has also been referred to as “vowel symbolism” or “magnitude symbolism”.

What about the non-existent pambalaa? Daniel Tammett proposes the meaning “someone round and fat” (as opposed to someone angular and thin). His form is clearly a variation on a theme. And it is a sensible one. I’m pretty sure almost anyone would answer (a) to the quiz question above. Heck, even Siwu speakers say it’s (a) and not (b). That is, they can make sense of the word even though it doesn’t exist — just like us.

…whereby Tammet proves his own point

Daniel’s point in the section on sound-symbolism is that we have an intuitive sense for the meaning of some words. By misremembering this Siwu word, he inadvertently proves his point in a powerful way. For he got the sound-symbolic pattern right. Many of the world’s languages feature words like these, in which the vowel quality is used in a meaningful way (more on that in this recent post on lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu, and an old post on some Japanese ideophones). Cross-linguistically, the vowel a tends to be used for things of greater magnitude; or more precisely, the relation between that vowel and other vowels is often used iconically to map onto a relation between bigger and smaller things. This is why we go for choice (a) in Daniel’s quiz.

So Daniel, if you read this, thanks for the demonstration that sound-symbolism makes sense, and that memory is not just about storing hard and dry facts, but also (perhaps even moreso) about storing relational structures that allow us to creatively reconstruct stuff when needed. To me, this is one of the things that make human language and the human mind so endlessly fascinating.

Rembrandt and Van Gogh

Some interesting features of ideophone systems can be illustrated using this case. For one thing, we can often at least partly make sense of ideophones even if they’re not our own language. This is because they often tap into the general depictive potential of speech sounds and articulatory gestures. But that is not the whole story. Notice how Daniel’s quiz focuses on only one dimension of the ideophone’s meaning: size. Notice, too, that we use only one cue to decide on our answer: vowel quality. But pambalaa and more precisely the existing forms pimbilii and pumbuluu are not just about magnitude; they depict something quite specific, namely the bulging roundness of a belly. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have predicted that part. Here we are moving beyond generic, possibly universal cues; we are getting into the realm of convention.

Ideophone systems always show this interesting combination of iconicity and convention. This is why they don’t always look the same across languages. We can tell Siwu ideophones from Semai ideophones just like we can tell a Rembrandt from a Van Gogh. Different languages represent slightly different depictive traditions, and this is what gives ideophone systems their language-specific signature.

Siwu speakers can tell whether some form is an existing word or not. Pimbilii is, pambalaa is not. Ideophones tend to be actual words — existing items in a language, not just expressive outcries or spontaneous sound-paintings. But pambalaa illustrates a good way to make new ideophones: use widely shared iconic principles and build on existing words. This is, incidentally, exactly what I occasionally see happening in my video-recordings of every conversation in Siwu: people sometimes create new ideophones, and when they do so, they use the toolkit for depiction provided by existing ideophones. Like Daniel Tammet’s pambalaa, the cases of ideophone creation I recorded in the video corpus show that creative depictions never occur in a vacuum, but always in the context of a broader linguistic system, using existing depictive practices.

That’s it for today — I’m off to get something to eat. If I tell you that my belly is pimbilii now, you can tell what it should be like in a couple of hours!

References

  1. Tammet, Daniel. 2007. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant: A Memoir. New York: Free Press.
  2. Tammet, Daniel. 2009. Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind. New York: Free Press.

Can you tell the difference between lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu?

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Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them evokes an image of being seriously fat, the other depicts the state of being merely chubby. Can you guess which is which?

Few people find this question difficult to answer. But I won’t reveal the right answer just yet. Instead, by way of celebrating the fact that thesis.ideophone.org is now fully up and running, I want to show you how my senior consultant Ruben explains these ideophones in Siwu. Pay particular attention to his gestures — you’ll see that it is fairly easy to get an idea of the meanings of these ideophones even if you don’t understand Siwu!

Folk definition of lɛkɛrɛɛ by Ruben:

[jwplayer file="/wp-content/blogs.dir/4/files/video/9_lekeree_RO.flv" captions.file="/files/video/9_lekeree_RO.srt"]

Folk definition of lukuruu by Ruben:

[jwplayer file="/wp-content/blogs.dir/4/files/video/9_lukuruu_RO.flv" captions.file="/files/video/9_lukuruu_RO.srt"]

(Note. I somehow can’t get the subtitles to display here on my blog. Another reason to check out the clips on their own page, where everything works smoothly!)

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New publications on ideophones

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Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language of Perception project. This special issue, edited by Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, also features two articles on ideophones: one by Sylvia Tufvesson and one by yours truly.

Sylvia’s article is entitled Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract:

Sylvia Tufvesson, Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World

In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In Semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic iconic structure whereby related sensory experiences receive related linguistic forms. Through this type of form-meaning mapping, gradient relationships in the perceptual world receive gradient linguistic representations. Form-meaning mapping such as this enables speakers to categorize sensory events into types and subtypes of perceptions, and provide sensory specifics of various kinds. This study illustrates how a diagrammatic iconic structure within sensory vocabulary creates networks of relational sensory knowledge. Through analogy, speakers draw on this knowledge to comprehend sensory referents and create new unconventional forms, which are easily understood by other members of the community. Analogy-making such as this allows speakers to capture fine-grained differences between sensory events, and effectively guide each other through the Semai sensory landscape.

My article is titled Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract:

Mark Dingemanse, Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society

This article explores language, culture, and the perceptual world as reflected in a particular linguistic device: ideophones, marked words that depict sensory imagery. Data from a range of elicitation tasks shows that ideophones are a key resource in talking about sensory perception in Siwu. Their use in everyday conversations underlines their communicative versatility while at the same time showing that people delight in their expressiveness. In ideophones, we have an expressive resource that combines sheer playfulness with extraordinary precision

References

  1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. The Senses and Society 6(1). 77-85. doi:10.2752/174589311X12893982233830.  
  2. Tufvesson, Sylvia. 2011. Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World. The Senses and Society 6(1). 86-95. doi:10.2752/174589311X12893982233876.  

The power of vivid suggestion

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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.

Upcoming talk: Ezra Pound among the Mawu

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Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 9-14, 2009. It looks like an interesting bunch of linguists and literary theorists. I will give a talk on Tuesday the 9th, the abstract for which can be found below.

Ezra Pound among the Mawu: the everyday poetics of ideophones in a West-African society

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The language of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana has a large class of ideophones: marked iconic words that vividly evoke feelings. Ideophones are found abundantly in African, Asian, and Amerindian languages; as a distinct class of words they are rare in Indo-European (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). Their use has been summarized eloquently by Fortune:

‘With them one is in a special realm of spoken art. There is a roundness, a complete shape, not so vividly conveyed by more complex constructions, more formal expressions. They attempt to be a vivid re-presentation or re-creation of an event in sound … Always they try to capture the freshness of an event and express it of themselves with nothing to dull or cloud the evocation’ (Fortune 1962, 6)

The similarity between ideophonic and poetic language is easy to see (cf. Nuckolls 2006). Yet the shadow of Lévy-Bruhl, who assigned mimesis in language to the realm of primitivity, has loomed large over linguistics and literary theory alike. The poet Ezra Pound, a central figure of Modernism, is a case in point: while his fascination with Chinese writing spawned the ideogrammic method, the mimicry and gestures of the ‘primitive languages in Africa’ would never become more than a mere curiosity (ABC of Reading, 21).

This talk imagines Pound transposed into the culture of the Mawu. What would have struck him about their ways of ‘charging language’ with imagery? I will show that there are three levels of iconicity in Siwu ideophones —direct, relative, and Gestalt iconicity— which are combined in various ways to vividly recreate sensory events in sound. The abundant use of ideophones across a wide range of discourse genres suggests a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. These observations will be juxtaposed with Pound’s views on the ‘word of literary art which presents, defines, suggests the visual image’ (Selected Prose, 321), and his perpetual interest in the exact qualities of perceptions. The goal of this contrastive analysis is to shed light on the linguistic and cultural ecology of an everyday poetic device in the world’s languages, and in so doing to rehabilitate what one might call ‘the ideophonic method’.

References

  1. Fortune, G. 1962. Ideophones in Shona: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland on 28 April 1961. Oxford University Press.
  2. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Paris.
  3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 2006. The Neglected Poetics of Ideophony. In Language, Culture, and the Individual, ed. Catherine O’Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite, 39-50. München: Lincom Europa.
  4. Pound, Ezra. 1914. Vorticism. Fortnightly Review 96, no. 573: 461-471.
  5. ———. 1934. ABC of Reading. London: Routledge.
  6. ———. 1973. Selected Prose. New York: New Directions.
  7. Voeltz, F. K. Erhard, and Christa Kilian-Hatz, eds. 2001. Ideophones. Typological Studies in Language, 44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Two talks on ideophones at SOAS

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If you’re in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones tomorrow afternoon: one by my colleague Sylvia Tufvesson and one by myself. The talks will be on Wednesday, 3 June, 3-5pm, in room 4418 in SOAS. Here are the titles and abstracts:

Phonosemantics and perceptual structures: The case of Semai ideophones

by Sylvia Tufvesson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Ideophonic vocabulary often displays some degree of sound symbolism; i.e. perceived likeness between form and meaning such that words with similar meanings resemble each other phonetically. Languages differ in their means of attaining such form-meaning mapping and these correlations can develop freely in spontaneous speech. This talk examines one such pattern, that of stem alternation. The language of focus is Semai (Austroasiatic, Mon-Khmer), spoken by an Aslian community on Peninsular Malaysia. Semai ideophones convey speakers´ perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, often withmultiple aspects of an experience encoded in one word. Data show that through different types of stem alternation, speakers express fine-grained semantic differences between different sensory events. This structural tool is used to switch between sensory modalities or convey differences in the internal structure of a specific sensory event. In addition, some types of alternations are used more productively than others in spontaneous speech, suggesting a continuum of conventionality in the linguistic encoding of perception.

How to do things with ideophones. Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Many African, Asian and American languages have a class of words called ideophones: marked words that vividly evoke sensations and perceptions. Hitherto, research on ideophony has focused almost exclusively on the form of ideophones to the neglect of their function. This talk will look at ideophones in actual usage in Siwu, a Kwa language of eastern Ghana. It will be shown that ideophones occur across a wide variety of speech genres, including conversations, arguments, insults, narratives, greeting routines, and special genres like riddles, recreational dances, and funeral dirges. A closer look at data from about 60 minutes of spontaneous conversations will elucidate the different uses to which ideophones are put by both speakers and recipients in tellings and turn-by-turn talk. Some specific genres, including funeral dirges and recreational dances, will be compared to show how the use of ideophones may be constrained by genre.

Giggles follow-up: smiling verbs and happy adjectives show facial motor resonances

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Just a quick follow-up on my earlier post. Foroni & Semin (in press, Psychological Science) do what I hoped somebody did: examining the bodily grounding of non-ideophonic vocabulary related to emotional states. Theirs is not an imaging study like Osaka & Osaka 2005, but a study of motor resonance in facial muscles. The terms tested are action verbs (to smile; to frown) and adjectives for the corresponding emotional states (without overt facial configurational semantics), e.g. ‘happy; angry’.

Very briefly, the results indicate that both types of words induce motor resonance in facial muscles, though the action verbs do so more strongly than the adjectives. The authors note the striking similarity of the results to earlier experiments involving visual stimuli (pictures of facial expressions, Ekman style; e.g. Dimberg & Petterson 2000). An interesting second experiment shows that the motor resonance even exerts influence on judgements of the funniness of cartoons: subjects subliminally primed with the verb ‘smile’ tend to rate cartoons as funnier than subjects subliminally primed with the verb ‘frown’. If facial muscle activity is inhibited by having participants holding a pen between their lips, the effect is not significant; neither is it significant in the case of adjectives like happy and angry.

There is some wiggle room still for ideophones. As Foroni and Semin say, ‘Not all linguistic expressions have the same consequences. Certain categories (i.e. verbs) induce motor resonance more than others and contribute differentially to the shape of our judgments.’ My hypothesis would be that ideophones for emotional states and facial configurations would rival verbs in the extent to which they cause motor resonance. Osaka & Osaka’s (2005) results are inconclusive in this regard, because they did not include non-ideophonic action verbs or other words in their comparison.

References

  1. Dimberg, Ulf, and Maria Petterson. 2000. Facial Reactions to Happy and Angry Facial Expressions: Evidence for Right Hemisphere Dominance. Psychophysiology 37, no. 05: 693-696.
  2. Foroni, Francesco, & Semin, Gün R. (2009). Language that puts you in touch with your bodily feelings: The Multimodal Responsiveness of Affective Expressions. Psychological Science.
  3. Osaka, Naoyuki, and Mariko Osaka. 2005. Striatal reward areas activated by implicit laughter induced by mimic words in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroreport 16, no. 15 (October 17): 1621-1624.  

Giggles and gargles

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imai-galagala

Illustration © Imai Lab 2006

A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the results should be treated with caution. And Japanese gargle with salt water regularly as a prevention against the common cold; they even have an ideophone for it (but so do we, don’t we?). That’s giggles and gargles today. Let’s tackle the giggles first.

Ideophones that make you feel good

A 2005 brain imaging study suggests that ideophones for laughter, but not nonsense syllables, activate reward areas in the brain. Here is the abstract:

The neurobiological reward components of laughter induced by words were investigated. A functional magnetic resonance imaging-based brain imaging study demonstrated that visualization of mimic words and emotional facial expressionwords, highly suggestive of laughter, heard by the ear, significantly activate striatal reward centers, including the putamen/caudate/nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortices, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, while non-mimic words under the same task that did not imply laughter do not activate these areas in humans. We tested a specific hypothesis that implicit laughter modulates the striatal dopaminergic reward centers by image formation of onomatopoeic words implying laughter and successfully confirmed the hypothesis. [Osaka & Osaka 2005]

Since ideophones have been claimed to somehow establish a more direct link between sounds and sensations than other words, brain imaging of ideophone production and comprehension is an exciting research area. Basically, the finding of Osaka & Osaka is that Japanese ideophones for laughter activate striatal reward areas, just like real laughter and other pleasurable activities do. The ideophones used are ‘ghera-ghera’ (strong laughter), ‘nikoh-nikoh’ (strong), ‘kusu-kusu’ (medium), ‘niyah-niyah’ (medium), ‘herahherah’ (weak) and ‘nitah-nitah’ (weak) (p. 1622, romanization by the authors).

But is it ideophony?

That is an interesting result, but I wonder: does the effect really occur because the words are ideophones, evoking the experience of laughter through their sound-symbolic form and imagistic meaning? Or could it simply be due to the fact that the words have to do with laughter? We can’t tell, because the baseline comparison is not with non-ideophonic real words but with nonsense words (called ‘nonsense phonemes’ by the authors). Since non-ideophonic laughter-related words have been kept out of the comparison, we cannot be sure that ideophony (onomatopoeia/mimesis) is causing the effect, although this is what the authors would like to claim.

There is some reason to think that embodied semantics might be enough to induce such effects; think for example of the brain imaging studies showing that certain sensori-motor cortex areas not only upon tactile stimulation of the body part in question (e.g. the hand), but also during the processing of body part terms and verbs implying them (e.g. hand, grasp; Rohrer 2001). So the question is: would the effect found by Osaka & Osaka also occur with non-ideophonic laughter-related words in Japanese? For comparison, it would also be good to have a not so heavily ideophonic language thrown in. Would the English verbs ‘giggle’ and ‘laugh’ also trigger the effect? Sound-symbolic ‘giggle’ moreso than ‘laughter’? Then things start to be really interesting.

A related problem is the claim that ‘image formation of onomatopoeic words’ plays a role in the effect. Once again this would be an interesting claim to test; native speakers of ideophonic languages often report that ideophones evoke vivid images. But in this study it remains an untested background assumption. The way the experiment is set up doesn’t seem to allow for any inferences about it. For all we know the effect might just be due to an association between the sound and the experience of laughter; it is not at all obvious why image formation would come in. One way to approach this issue would be to do imaging studies of ideophones that don’t imitate sounds, but other sensory events.

[Update: Kimi Akita notes that the stimuli, described by the authors as 'laughter onomatopoeic words' (p. 1622), actually mix sound-imitating ideophones (geragera and kusukusu) and movement/visual pattern-imitating ideophones (nikoniko, niyaniya, herahera, and nitanita). It doesn't really help that all of the results are averaged. I might add that Japanese itself does distinguish the two groups by the terms giongo and gitaigo, even though to a non-native speaker the actual categorization in this case isn't obvious (I would've grouped herahera with geragera, and I wonder what kusukusu laughter sounds like...).]

Gargles

So much for the giggles. What about the gargles? The gorgeous gargling girl above is one of the stimuli used by Prof. Mutsumi Imai in a study of child-directed speech in Japanese. One of her findings is that when describing scenes like this to their child, mothers will tend to use more mimetics (ideophones) than when they are describing the same scene to an adult.

I’m planning to do a pilot in Kawu using prof. Imai’s stimuli, and one question is to what extent the original material would be usable in a West-African context. The idea is that the stimuli can be described using ideophones. Since most of the illustrations are simple events (jumping down, jumping across, throwing, rolling sth. up) I think they should be usable by and large. Perhaps the skin color will have to be changed — I prefer stimuli to be as culturally inconspicuous as possible — though the question is whether that really would affect what we’re after.

However, the one stimulus that I think won’t be familiar is the gargling one above. In the Japanese context, it is meant to elicit the ideophone garagara, probably in the light verb construction X suru ‘do X’. But in Kawu, the scene isn’t very recognizable. People usually drink from calebashes (or their hands), though whites are known to prefer cups — so my guess is that the girl would simply be seen as drinking. Since gargling is not a culturally salient event in Mawu society, I don’t think people would readily think of it, even if there happens to be an ideophonic word for it.

The Japanese ideophone for gargling is garagara. Interestingly, Kimi Akita tells me that “Japanese mothers tell their kids to pronounce “garagara” while gargling. This is because the articulation (especially, that of the velar consonant) of the mimetic is believed to help kids gargle successfully.” Now that’s an interesting intermingling of habitus and embodied meaning. I tried this (without any appreciable gargling experience) and nearly choked. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Embodied semantics is a killer idea”!

References

  1. Imai, Mutsumi, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and Hiroyuki Okada. 2008. Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition 109, no. 1 (October): 54-65. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015.
  2. Osaka, Naoyuki, and Mariko Osaka. 2005. Striatal reward areas activated by implicit laughter induced by mimic words in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroreport 16, no. 15 (October 17): 1621-1624.  
  3. Rohrer, Tim. 2001. Understanding through the body: fMRI and ERP investigations into the neurophysiology of cognitive semantics. Talk presented at the 2001 International Cognitive Linguistics Association, Santa Barbara: University of California.

P.S. Check out the wonderful bibliographies compiled by Kimi Akita:

  1. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Japanese. Electronic ms, Kobe University.
  2. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Other Languages. Electronic ms, Kobe University.