The full conclusions can be found in the thesis. What follows is a brief chapter by chapter summary. The bibliography is also available.
Part I: Ideophones
Part I of the thesis introduced ideophones and surveyed earlier research. Chapter 2 captured the cross-linguistically robust features of ideophones by defining them as marked words that depict sensory imagery. After explaining the elements of this definition, much of the chapter was devoted to unpacking what can be thought of as its rich point: the claim that ideophones are depictions. As depictions, ideophones enable others to experience what it is like to perceive the scene depicted. I justified this claim by showing that ideophones are closely akin to physical demonstrations; that they are flagged as depictions in actual use; that speakers explain them in terms of “seeing as”; and that they show formal characteristics of depictive signs like relative iconicity and expressive morphology.
The depictive nature of ideophones is what underlies their sensory meanings and their uses as appeals to personal experience. It also provides a simple explanation for the markedness and aloofness of ideophones cross-linguistically: this is what signals the switch in mode of representation, helping to literally set apart the depictive ideophone from the surrounding descriptive material in the linear speech signal. Importantly, depiction is not to be equated with simple imitation or physical resemblance. Depictions make use of culture-bound, socially mediated representational conventions. It is this socially mediated nature that gives ideophone systems their language-specific signature.
Chapter 3 surveyed the history of linguistic work on ideophones, tracing the rise of ideophone research as a subtradition in African linguistics, the influence of writers such as Lévy-Bruhl in shaping the public imagination of ideophones as signs of primitive mentality, and the more recent cross-linguistic turn that led to wider recognition of the significance of ideophone systems. It emphasized the need to place ideophones in the context of the broader ecology of linguistic resources, and noted that the most blatant gaps in our knowledge concern their meaning and use in situated social interaction.
Part II: Siwu
Part II described ideophones in the context of the broader linguistic ecology of Siwu, the richly ideophonic Ghanaian language that was the subject of the field research described in the thesis. Chapters 4 and 5 provided the ethnographic and linguistic backdrop to later chapters, with chapter 5 providing a sketch of the grammar of Siwu and showing how ideophones fit in the broader systems of property-denoting expressions, the language of perception, and quotative devices. If this chapter showed that ideophones are well integrated in the broader linguistic system, the role of chapter 6 was to demonstrate that they nonetheless form a clearly distinct word class.
Findings of chapter 6 include the fact that ideophones are structurally marked by means of their word length, deviant phonotactic patterns, peculiar word forms and expressive morphology; that expressive morphology is not just random modification but exhibits an orderliness of its own and underlines the depictive character of the ideophonic sign; and that there is an inverse relation between the syntactic integration of ideophones and their susceptibility to expressive morphology and performative foregrounding. This latter finding illustrated the importance of corpus data in bringing to light possible lexicalisation or normalisation paths for ideophones. The chapter also addressed the common conflation of ideophones and interjections, arguing that despite some superficial similarities, these word classes are fundamentally different in semiotic as well as interactional terms.
Part III: Meaning
Part III examined aspects of the meaning of ideophones. Chapter 7 showed how different types of iconicity allow ideophones to move beyond the imitation of singular events towards perceptual analogies and generalisations of event structure. It also argued for the importance of the actual performance in establishing mappings between sound and sense, with a breaching experiment confirming that ideophones are produced as performances; and it explained the fact (often underplayed in the literature) that not all ideophones are transparently iconic by arguing that not iconicity, but the depictive mode of representation is fundamental to ideophony.
Chapter 8 probed six perceptual domains using dedicated stimuli, finding that ideophones are the sensory words par excellence. The results of this chapter do not only tell us about the language of perception in Siwu, they are also of wider relevance because they show that stimulus materials can be used to elicit ideophones and can play a key role as a tertium comparationis in developing a semantic typology of their meanings.
Chapter 9 used folk definitions to gain insight into the meanings of ideophones. It showed that such definitions specify important aspects of the background knowledge against which ideophones are understood, and that depictive gestures are crucial to illustrating the imagistic meanings of ideophones. Moreover, speakers often employ other ideophones as semantic anchoring points in the definitions, revealing sense relations of similarity and dissimilarity (but not, significantly, hyponymy or hyperonymy). This latter point suggests that all ideophones operate at a similar level of specificity, something that again meshes well with their status as depictions of specific sensory imagery.
Chapter 10 used a sorting task to tap into the conceptual structure of the domain of ideophones. It showed that speakers handle ideophones consistently and that for them, the domain is organised by richly diverse aspects of sensory perception, from SURFACE APPEARANCE to SPATIAL EXTENT and from MOUTH-FEEL to TEXTURE. This represents an important improvement over previous semantic classifications, which hitherto have been based on analyst’s intuitions more than on native speaker judgements. The chapter thus showed that a sorting task can provide a way to explore the semantic fields of ideophones without imposing preconceived categories.
Part IV: Use
The greatest blank in previous research has no doubt been the lack of studies of the ideophone in actual use, and especially in naturally occurring contexts. This has hampered progress on a number of fronts, and the chapters in Part IV addressed some of the questions that can be answered with this kind of data. Most important, in terms of setting the record straight, is the finding that ideophones are far from the erratic stylistic flourishes that they have been made out to be. In chapter 11 I showed that speakers wield ideophones as communicative precision tools in everyday speech, using them to share in sensory perceptions and to subtly sort out matters of epistemic authority. I was able to explain these uses with reference to work done in earlier parts of the thesis: they build on the depictive nature of ideophones (chapters 2 and 7) and their close connection to sensory imagery (chapters 8-10). The chapter focused on naturally occurring, informal talk-in-interaction because this is the basic stream of verbal behaviour that underlies all other ways of speaking. As we saw, earlier proposals about the use of ideophones run into problems as soon as we leave the familiar territory of narratives: they are either too restricted or too sweeping to account for many observed patterns of use. In contrast, the data-driven analysis of this chapter easily incorporated all earlier proposals while at the same time offering the explanatory power to accommodate the new findings.
Chapter 12 extended the investigation to two special ways of speaking: greetings and funeral dirges. In the context of received views about ideophones as quintessentially spontaneous, dramatic and idiosyncratic, the common use of ideophones in these genres might be thought of as unexpected. As we saw, however, it is not so unexpected after all: the baseline established in the previous chapter allowed us to see that it builds on some of the core interactional functions of ideophones in everyday speech. The use of ideophones in these disparate genres points to a common element that underlies them both: an emphasis on the sharing of experience that values communality and being together. The chapter also drew attention to the way in which the aesthetics of everyday language —in the form of ideophones— may feed into genres of verbal art.
Chapter 13 documented for the first time some clear cases of ideophone creation in a corpus of naturally occurring speech. An analysis of these cases showed that ideophone creation relies on general principles outlined in earlier chapters, for instance the use of performative foregrounding to signal a switch to the depictive mode of representation, and the use of the regular iconic mappings outlined in chapter 7 to suggest meaning. Ideophones are thus not created out of thin air, but build on the communicative competence —including ideophonic competence— of speakers of Siwu. One implication for the issue of language and creativity is that this form of linguistic creativity is based not on generating novel meanings using connotations and denotations of existing words, but instead on presenting new verbal material in such a way that the interlocutor treats it as a creative depiction.
Chapter 14 used corpus data to examine previous claims about the link between ideophones and gestures. It found that these claims are too strong: it is not the case that ideophones are almost always accompanied by gestures. Moreover, discourse type makes a difference: ideophones are more commonly accompanied with gestures in tellings than in other contexts. The chapter also found that there is a special affinity between ideophones and depictive gestures. Based on these findings it rephrased a conjecture by Kita to say that “if a communicative move features both a depictive gesture and an ideophone, the two will tend to be synchronised.” Finally, it proposed two reasons for the tight coupling of ideophones and depictive gestures: first, the fact that both ideophone and gesture are holistic depictions of complex states; and second, the fact that both form part of a single performative act.
Chapter 15 concludes the thesis and sketches future directions.
Zie ook de samenvatting in het Nederlands.
