Product Code Database
An ideophone (also known as a mimetic or expressive) is a member of the word class that depict sensory imagery or sensations, (2025). 9780191887185, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191887185 evoking ideas of action, sound, movement, color, or shape. The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere. Ideophones resemble but are different owing to their special Phonetics or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic function within the sentence. They may include sounds that deviate from the language's phonological system, Imitation—often in a repetitive manner—sounds of movement, animal noises, bodily sounds, noises made by tools or machines, and the like.
While English language does have ideophonic or onomatopoetic expressions, it does not contain a proper class of ideophones because any English onomatopoeic word can be included in one of the classical categories. For example, la-di-da functions as an adjective while others, such as zigzag, may function as a verb, adverb or adjective, depending on the clausal context. In the sentence "The rabbit zigzag ged across the meadow", the verb zigzag takes the past -ed verb ending. In contrast, the reconstructed example *"The rabbit zigzag zigzag across the meadow" emulates an ideophone but is not idiomatic to English.
Dictionaries of languages like Japanese, Korean, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu list thousands of ideophones. Sometimes ideophones are called phonosemantic to indicate that it is not a grammatical word class in the traditional sense of the word (like verb or noun), but rather a lexical class based on the special relationship between form and meaning exhibited by ideophones. In the discipline of linguistics, ideophones have sometimes been overlooked or treated as a subgroup of interjections.
Ideophones evoke sensory events. A well known instance of ideophones are onomatopoeia words—words that imitate the sound (of the event) they refer to. Some ideophones may be derived from onomatopoeic notions. In many languages, however, ideophones do not solely represent sound. For instance, in Gbaya languages, kpuk 'a rap on the door' may be onomatopoeic, but other ideophones depict motion and visual scenes: loɓoto-loɓoto 'large animals plodding through mud', kiláŋ-kiláŋ 'in a zigzagging motion', pɛɗɛŋ-pɛɗɛŋ 'razor sharp'.
Ideophones are often characterized as Iconicity or Sound symbolism words, meaning that there can be a resemblance between their form and their meaning. For instance, in West-African languages, voiced consonants and low tone in ideophones are often connected to largeness and heaviness, whereas voiceless consonants and high tones tend to relate to smallness and lightness.Westermann 1927 Reduplication figures quite prominently in ideophones, often conveying a sense of repetition or plurality present in the evoked event.Watson in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001 The iconicity of ideophones is shown by the fact that people can guess the meanings of ideophones from various languages at a level above chance.Iwasaki et al. 2007, Dingemanse et al. 2015 However, the form of ideophones does not completely relate to their meaning; as conventionalized words, they contain arbitrary, language-specific phonemes just like other parts of the vocabulary.
Despite this diversity, ideophones show a number of robust regularities across languages. One is that they are often marked in the same way as quoted speech and demonstrations. Sometimes ideophones can form a complete utterance on their own, as in English "ta-da!" or Japanese ta-da.Diffloth 1972 However, in such cases the word ideophone is used as a synonym to interjection. Proper ideophones may occur within utterances, depicting a scene described by other elements of the utterance, as in Japanese Taro wa sutasuta to haya-aruki o shita "Taro walked hurriedly' (literally 'Taro did haste-walk sutasuta
Using thi:
Without using thi:
|
|
