Kolloquium

Prof. Cornelia Ebert (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) & Prof. Markus Steinbach (Universität Göttingen) – A cross-modal semantic analysis of ideophones in spoken languages and idiomatic signs in sign languages.

Abstract:

Typological research has shown that many unrelated spoken languages have ideophones such as English helter-skelter or German plitsch-platsch. Ideophones form a special class of words which are used in specific registers (often vivid narrative contexts) and can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). They have been argued to be depictive items which establish an iconic relationship of the form of an ideophone (including the utterance of it) and its meaning, which lies in the domain of sensory imagery encoding information about movement, sound, sentiment or mental state. In addition, ideophones typically contribute non-at-issue information (similar to co-speech gestures). Some ideophones are mixed items that combine at-issue with non-at-issue information (Dingemanse & Akita 2017; Dingemanse 2012, 2019; Ćwiek 2022; Barnes et al. 2022; Barnes & Ebert 2023).

     In this presentation, we take a cross-linguistic and a cross-modal perspective and compare the semantic properties of ideophones in spoken languages with similar expressions in sign languages, so-called idiomatic signs. We show that ideophones and idiomatic signs semantically consist of a conventionalized at-issue meaning part and a gestural non-at-issue part, whose meaning can vary from utterance situation to utterance situation and is dependent on how the ideophone or idiomatic sign is produced in the given situation. Our semantic analysis builds on the formal gesture semantics account of Ebert et al. (2020) (based on Anderbois et al. 2015 and Davidson 2015) as well as Barnes & Ebert’s (2023) analysis developed for mixed ideophones. We thus provide a modality-independent analysis of the semantics of this special class of lexical expressions.