Lecture: Chit-chatting about ideophones and morphosyntactic integration

The morphosyntactic capacities of ideophones vary strongly between languages. In this presentation, I talk about ideophones of FEAR in Korean, Japanese, English and German and the differing way in which they can be used as predicates.

The inventory of ideophones in Korean and Japanese is massive, at least in popular comparison to well-studied Indo-European languages (Heine 2023: 146). While the debate on ideophones' status regarding their function and lexical category is ever-ongoing, this work is concerned with the degree of grammatical integration ideophones have in a language and the correlation of that integration with their capacity for predication. Using a sample of ideophones specific to the conceptual domain of FEAR from Korean, Japanese, English and German, I aim to find some answers to the question of whether grammatical integration (i.e. prosodic integration, negatability, variable morphology, constituency) might be proportional to the degree to which an ideophone can predicate over the rest of a sentence. I hypothesize that there is a positive correlation: While in languages with poorer integration like German and English, adverbial and quote-like constructions (e.g. "the car went 'boom'!") predicate more indirectly using ideophones, there are a number of reasons that could cause ideophones in Korean and Japanese to be more prevalent in predication. Among these are productivity in forming new ideophones, their sociolinguistic status, the general grammatical means of forming predicates in both languages, and possibly even the at-issueness status of ideophones in different parts of utterances (cf. Barnes et al. 2023).

Since this is only work-in-progress, I invite all those interested to join and discuss!

References:
Heine, Bernd. 2023. The Grammar of Interactives. Oxford University Press.
Barnes, Kathryn Rose, Cornelia Ebert, Robin Hörnig & Theresa Stender. 2022. The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach. Glossa 7(1).

Info

Day: 2023-10-27
Start time: 12:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 1
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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