Contrastive Liuistics: An exploration of ideaophones in Yoruba and Edo speech communiities (original) (raw)

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.