Revising an Implicational Hierarchy for the Meanings of Ideophones, with Special Reference to Japonic
Linguistic Typology 2020; aop Bonnie McLean* Revising an implicational hierarchy for the meanings of ideophones, with special reference to Japonic https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2063 Abstract: An elicitation task was conducted with speakers of Japonic varieties to investigate whether stimuli of varying sensory modalities (e.g. audio, visual, tactile etc.) were more or less likely to elicit ideophones or iconic words. Stimuli representing sounds, movements, shapes and textures were most likely to elicit ideophones, and this is posited to reflect the relative ease or naturalness with which these domains can be mapped iconically to speech. The results mirror macro-level patterns of linguistic diversity, as these are also domains in which ideophones are most widely attested cross-linguistically. The findings call for the revision of a previously constructed implicational hierarchy for the semantic development of ideophone systems, adding to it the categories of FORM and TEXTURE as domains in which ideophones are most likely to develop, after SOUND and MOVEMENT. Independent evidence for the revised hierarchy comes from a semantic analysis of the elicited ideophones, where it was found that domains early in the hierarchy were more likely to be sources for semantic extension, while later domains were more likely to be targets. These findings are expected to be replicable for other languages, and offer exciting new directions for research into the semantic typology of ideophones. Keywords: ideophones, iconicity, sensory language, semantic typology, implica- tional hierarchies, semantic maps, Japanese, Ryukyuan 1 Introduction In linguistic typology, the term ideophone refers to ‘a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery’ (Dingemanse 2019; see also Blench 2010; Diffloth 1972; Hinton et al.
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