Part III: Meaning

Part III of the thesis investigates the meaning of ideophones. The first chapter in this part describes the special relations between form and meaning exhibited by ideophones. The other chapters use a variety of elicitation methods together with folk definitions, a pile-sorting task, and metalinguistic evidence to yield a more comprehensive view of the semantics of ideophone systems. The chapters have the twin goals of describing the meanings of ideophones in Siwu and piloting new methods for the development of ideophone typology across languages.

  1. Ideophones and iconicity
    Supplements: audio clips data extracts
  2. Eliciting ideophones: the Language of Perception tasks
    Supplements: Figure 8.1 (colour version)
  3. Determining the meaning of ideophones: folk definitions
    Supplements: Video clips of selected folk definitions; Figure 9.1 (colour version)
  4. Conceptual structuring in ideophones: a pile sorting task
    Supplements: Figure 10.1 (high resolution); Figure 10.2 (high resolution); photos of the pile-sorting task