A working definition of ideophones

Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events

For some time now I've been using a concise working definition of ideophones. The definition is not intended as a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for ideophonehood. Ideophony is a slippery notion (Childs 1994). The point of the definition therefore is to provide an anchoring point — a characterization of the possibility space in the canonical typological sense of the term (Corbett 2005). (Want to cite this definition? See below.)

The definition fits the observation that the syntactic status of ideophonic vocabulary may differ from language to language (Newman 1968; Kilian-Hatz 2001). It also more or less subverts the opposition Kulemeka (1995) sets up between the ‘sound symbolic’ and ‘grammatical’ approaches to ideophony, by being broad enough to serve as a general cross-linguistic characterization of ideophonic phenomena, while leaving room for the details to be spelled out for specific languages.

This page offers a word-by-word elaboration of the crucial constituents of the definition, using slides that may be familiar to those that have seen one of my recent presentations.

Let me clarify my use of 'marked' (Haspelmath 2006). Through their special word forms, deviant phonotactics, and expressive prosody, ideophones mark themselves as different from normal words; they draw attention to themselves as depictions (see below); they wear expressivity on their sleeve. This is closest to Haspelmath's sense 3 ('overt coding' in the sense of 'signaled, 'coded', 'indicated'). I feel that his alternative 'overtly coded' for this sense is not without its problems in the case of ideophones, since it seems to imply a 'marker', prototypically a piece of morphology.

That ideophones are words may sound trivial, but especially linguists that have not encountered ideophones before tend to wonder whether they are 'real words'. They are. Ideophones are conventionalized within speech communities; they are listable; speakers can provide folk definitions of them, and analysts can get at their meaning using good old lexicographic methods (Samarin 1967, Dingemanse in prep.).

Ideophones are vivid, turning speaker into performer by transporting the narrated event into the speech event. In a sense, this is a corollary of their depictive nature (see below). This pragmatic, playful, poetic effect is crucial to the canonical type of ideophones, though it may leak away in specific contexts or constructions (Dingemanse 2009b)

Ideophones depict rather than describe; they are quite similar in that sense to direct quotations. Representationally, they are more like a painting that depicts a scene (e.g. Van Gogh's Almond Blossom) than like a paraphrase (e.g. 'a branch of almond blossoming against a blue sky'), though this is somewhat of a shorthand covering several iconic mappings.

Ideophones depict by using the sensory properties of speech (not just the auditory signal, but also the articulatory gestures) to suggest meaning. There are several types of iconic mappings: a direct mapping of sound to sound in onomatopoeia, the simplest mapping in a sense; a less direct mapping of the perceptual Gestalt of the word onto the spatio-temporal unfolding of the event; and a relative mapping where related forms map onto related meanings.

Ideophones are good at encoding sensory events. There are interesting cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of ideophonic vocabulary across the semantic domains of perception and sensations, which is one of the things we are trying to get at in the World Ideophone Survey.

How to cite this resource

Want to cite this definition? This would be the citation:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. A working definition of ideophones. The Ideophone. http://ideophone.org/working-definition/

Or if you prefer a published (as opposed to online) source, the definition has also been published in the following paper:

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.

References

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5. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009a. How To Do Things With Ideophones: Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu. Paper presented at the SOAS Research Seminar, June 3, London.
6. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009b. The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones. Paper presented at the RRG Conference, August 9, London.
7. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009c. 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.
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