Diagrammatic Iconicity in EkeGusii: A relation between the structure of form and meaning (original) (raw)
Related papers
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
Frontiers in Psychology, 2010
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to "hook up" to motor and perceptual experience.
One form, many meanings: iconicity in phonological and semantic development
2019
I would also like to thank the many people who have continued to support and encourage my interest in iconicity and ideophones, including Professor Toshiki Osada and Professor Nathan Badenoch, who supervised me during my internship and Kyoto, and who broadened my knowledge of the diversity of ideophones cross-linguistically by introducing me to ideophones in Mundari (Austroasiatic) and in Khmu. I would also iv like to thank Professor Gerard Diffloth, whom I also met in Kyoto. Professor Diffloth has also been a victim of my long emails, but has always replied to my many questions about ideophones in Austroasiatic languages with generosity and patience. I would also like to thank the many people who have supported me in Australia, and taken an interest in my research on ideophones, sharing with me a fresh perspective on my work from outside the field. These include but are not limited to Dr
Contrastive Liuistics: An exploration of ideaophones in Yoruba and Edo speech communiities
Abstract Crystal (1997: 189) defines “Ideophones” as “a term used in linguistics and phonetics for any vivid representation of an idea in sound, such as occurs through onomatopoeia”. Ideophones tend to be longer in terms of the combination of sounds than lexical classes. Thus, it enables the users to pack meaning into single morphemes thereby making the words semantically multidimensional. (Woodbury1987:715). Vowel repetition or lengthening is also a characteristic of ideophones. Ideophones are often phonologically anomalous in terms of sounds and sound sequences, tonal structure and phonological behaviour. (Welmer1973:27). In any case, these features have an income relation between sound and meaning. Just like any natural language, ideophones represent a robust word category in African language. To this end, this work is designed to arrive at an applicable analysis and classification of Edo and Yoruba ideophones using a contrastive approach inspired by the idea of canonical typology. The theory of Autosegmental morphology as propounded by Welmer (1981), Marrantz (1982) and Anderson (1992) is employed in this study. This theory proposes that reduplication is essential affixation, but what is affixed is a prosodic template, that is, a syllable foot or even a phonological word is the affixation of a consonant- vowel (CV) skeleton which is itself a morpheme to a stem. The phonemic content of the reduplicative affix is then derived by copying the complete phonemic melody of the root and linking it to the affixer CV template respecting the principles of association familiar from auto segmental phonology. The researcher looks at the features of the selected ideophones and tries to see if there are syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features of these groups of words in Edo and Yoruba ideophones. Data for this study have been gathered from the interview conducted for the thirty subjects (fifteen from each group) from Ibadan, Oyo state and Akoko Edo, Edo State of Nigeria. In addition to this, samples of ideophones from the previous studies in these two languages Awoyale 1983; Maduka; 1982 were drawn and used as supplement to the raw data collected. It is clear from the results, the researcher is able to establish the fact that there is an avalanche of ideophones in the two selected languages and that they have certain category which can be differentiated by specific sets of parameters such as phonetic, phonological, morphological and semantic all of which can be used to determine its status as a linguistic entity.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2019
Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.
Sound Symbolism in Central Nigerian Languages
Central Nigerian languages have been poorly served by the literature on phonosemantics in Africa and Nigeria in particular. Data of Tarok language in central Nigeria are examined for special use of phonemes and segments that encode emotive meanings. Phonosemantics in the language covers onomatopoeia, ideophones, tonal changes, manipulation of phoneme length and prosodies to encode emotive content of size, sensations and the like. A few examples other than Tarok will be cited too for better understanding of the phenomena that may be relevant in the entire central Nigeria.
Iconicity as the motivation for the signification and locality of deictic grammatical tones in Tal
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics , 2024
We present novel evidence for iconicity in core morphophonological grammar by documenting, describing, and analysing two patterns of tonal alternation in Tal (West Chadic, Nigeria). When a non-proximal deixis modifies a noun in Tal, every tone of the modified noun is lowered. When the nominal modifier is a proximal deixis, the final tone of the modified noun is raised. The tone lowering and raising are considered the effects of non-proximal and proximal linkers, which have the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] as their respective exponents. The realisation and maximal extension of the non-proximal tone features are considered effects of morpheme-specific featural correspondence constraints. Similarly, the exponent of the proximal linker docking on the final TBU is due to the relative ranking of the proximal-specific correspondence constraints. The association of the tone features [–Upper, –Raised] and [+Raised] with non-proximal and proximal linkers, respectively, is in line with crosslinguistic patterns of magnitude iconicity. Given that the local and long-distance realisations of the proximal and non-proximal featural affixes respectively are perceptually similar to deictic gestures, the locality of the featural affixation is considered a novel pattern of iconicity. To motivate this pattern of iconicity, we extend the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory to include the crossmodal depiction of sensory imagery. Consequently, Tal presents evidence for iconicity as a motivation for morphophonological grammar.
2022
If there is one genre in language that exhibits special features in its compositeness, it is idioms. Their composition, whether it be a string of words or just one word (in agglutinating languages like Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya), is typically based on figurative language such as metaphors, metonyms, similes, hyperboles, understatements, and euphemisms. Ekegusii examples include the following: a) gotwera amate (literally 'to spit saliva on', which is a metaphor-based idiom meaning 'to bless someone or something'); b) goaka ekeranya (literally 'to cane someone', which is a metonymy-based idiom meaning 'to be nominated for a specific task' or 'to tell someone something vexing, be it true or false'); c) koragera buna omosamaro (literally 'to eat like someone from the Bosamaro clan', which is a simile-based idiom meaning 'to eat a lot'). This paper illustrates the different types of figurative language contained in Ekegusii idioms and shows, through some idioms formed only of verb forms, that the very definition of idiom as a group of words cannot be enough to define idiom in an agglutinating language.
Competing iconicities in the structure of languages
Cognitive Linguistics, 2013
The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examine the interaction between iconicity and grammar by focusing on the ways in which sign languages employ the physical body of the signer as a rich iconic resource for encoding a variety of grammatical notions. We show that the body can play three different roles in iconic forms in sign languages: it can be used as a naming device where body parts represent body parts; it can represent the subject argument of verbal signs, and it can stand for first person. These strategies interact and sometimes compete in the languages under study. Each langu...
Studies in Language
This paper presents a study on the form-meaning relationship within a subpart of the lexicon, namely lexical reduplication. It compares the semantic classification of lexical reduplication in diverse languages, focusing on three quantitative studies on the distributions of semantic categories in three typologically and genetically unrelated languages, Bikol, Tibetan and Arabic. On this basis, it is argued that the common view that lexical reduplications are a “semantically arbitrary class” and as such irrelevant for studies on reduplication is not justified. It is in contrast claimed that the mapping of certain meanings on this specific phonological pattern is highly iconic, and that these word forms can be classified as a specific subgroup of expressives. This group even shows remarkable parallels with the prototypical meanings of morphological reduplication. An explanation for this – certainly controversially discussed – observation could be provided by the cognitive semiotic conc...
The natural motivation of sound symbolism
This dissertation examines systematic sound-meaning correspondences in sound-symbolic words from a cross-linguistic perspective, investigating whether and to what degree they are naturally motivated. Its aims are to assess empirical evidence for the Explanatory Sound-symbolism Hypothesis (ESH): that sound symbolism is primarily governed by natural motivation, in particular, by a connection between human perceptual and language systems. The languages examined are Korean and English, which are genealogically unrelated.