How to do things with ideophones: a social interactional approach

The aim of this chapter is to find out what people are doing when they use ideophones. Working from a corpus of spontaneous conversations in Siwu, I use the methodology of conversation analysis to show that ideophones afford many interactional uses, from pursuing uptake to navigating complex territories of stance and knowledge; and I show how these uses are grounded in the core properties of ideophones surveyed in earlier chapters.

Audio clips

Extract 11.1: Bucket
Extract 11.2: Gbegbegbe
Extract 11.3: Fake gunpowder [lines 1-8]
Extract 11.4: Fake gunpowder [lines 9-18]
Extract 11.5: Fake gunpowder [lines 14-17]
Extract 11.6: Kɔdzo [lines 1-19]
Extract 11.7: Kɔdzo [lines 20-26]
Extract 11.8: Elephant [lines 1-27]
Extract 11.9: Elephant [lines 28-36]
Extract 11.10: Elephant [lines 59-70]
Extract 11.11: Sieve
Extract 11.12: Eagle
Extract 11.13: 1981 [lines 1-14]
Extract 11.14: 1981 [lines 46-49]
Extract 11.15: 1981 [lines 58-61]

The corpus

The data examined in this chapter come from a variety of Siwu interactions, all of them recorded in the village of Akpafu-Mempeasem. The settings are family compounds and public spaces. All of the interactions are characterized by a great degree of informality.

The transcripts in the thesis have been anonymised to protect the privacy of the participants. The people in the screenshots below have agreed to be shown here.