We have a new paper out!
McLean, B., & Dingemanse, M. (2025). A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In J. P. Williams (Ed.), Capturing Expressivity: Contexts, Methods, and Techniques for Linguistic Research (pp. 74–107). Oxford University Press. (pdf)
We provide an up to date overview of methods for documentary research on ideophones. We also review creative ways of analysing and representing ideophone meanings to come to better descriptions and a deeper understanding of this class of words.
The paper comes with visual abstract: a poster-style overview of the methods created by John Huisman that shows the chief uses of each method as well as the ways they can build on each other. The paper comes with open data and a number of interactive web applications.
Polysemiotic representations
Collecting data using multiple methods is one thing; representing the findings in ways that do justice to the phenomenon is another. The past decades have seen some interesting approaches to the challenge of representing ideophones lexicographically. One important conclusion we draw in our chapter is that “ideophones require polysemiotic representations, adapted to their specific sensory properties” (p. 90).
Some wonderful examples exist in the literature. I’ve always loved Janis Nuckolls’ pioneering work in this domain, which uses elegant schematic diagrams of meaning components of Quechua ideophones as well as inventive typography to represent the prosodic realization of an ideophone in actual use. See for instance the visual and typographic renditions of Sa below:
While Nuckolls’ 1996 book made the most of the possibilities of the printed page, she kept innovating and was one of the first, ten years ago, to present a multimedia dictionary of ideophones: Quechua Real Words. The entry for the same ideophone sa contains a brief description and four video clips of Quechua speakers giving examples of the use of this ideophone, gestures and speech prosody tightly coupled to give multimodal expression to the meaning.
Our chapter features a few more examples, including work by Kimi Akita on a Multimedia Encyclopedia of Japanese Mimetics and the now-defunct, but fortunately archived resource Onomatopedia, both on Japanese. We also link to work on the structure and semantic organisation of ideophone vocabulary by researchers like Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Thomas van Hoey and collaborators.
Reusing some open data from our own work on Japanese and Siwu, we also present ways in which lexical data can be presented in meaningfully structured interfaces. While lemma-based, linearly presented dictionaries are useful as reference works, interactive interfaces make it possible to explore the structure of the ideophone lexicon in more organic ways. We provide simple proofs of concepts of this for a bunch of Japanese mimetics and a set of 60 Siwu ideophones organized into sensory domains. Underlying these web apps are simple .csv databases of ideophones and their sensory relations or similarity ratings; the Shiny interface makes it easy to enable live exploration of network structures.
References cited
Akita, Kimi (2016). A multimedia encyclopedia of Japanese mimetics: a frame-semantic approach to L2 sound-symbolic words. In Kaori Kabata and Kiyoko Toratani (eds), Cognitive Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 139–168.
Nuckolls, J. B. (1996). Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.
Van Hoey, T. (2022, July 6). A semantic map for ideophones. In Fuyin Thomas Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics Volume 2. Leiden: Brill, 129–175. doi: 10.31219/osf.io/muhpd