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Ideophones in Gizey grammar

par Guitang, Guillaume
Référence World Congress of African Linguistics (11: 5-9 August 2024: Nairobi (Kenya))
Publication Non publié, 2024

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Ideophones have been defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019: 16). While the interest in ideophones has grown sustainedly, there still persist several mistaken assumptions in the literature that warrant specific attention being given to this topic. One of such mistaken assumptions is that ideophones constitute a distinct word class (part-of-speech) in every language in which they are attested. As Newman (1968: 108) notes, “the tendency to treat the term ‘ideophone’ as being parallel to such terms as noun, verb, or adverb conceals the fact that ideophones often constitute a subclass of some major category.” Also, as Ameka (2001: 26) points out, ideophones “are first and foremost a type of words—a lexical class of words—which need not belong to the same grammatical word class in a particular language nor across languages”. What is highlighted here is the fact that phono-semantic characterisation, which allows of the identification of ideophones cross-linguistically, should not prevent a morphosyntactic approach to ideophones. The term “ideophone” is frequently attested in descriptions of Gizey (Masa < Chadic < Afroasiatic), and it is used as a word class tag. However, the questions of what ideophones are (phono-semantic characterisation) and how they function (morphosyntactic characterisation) are absent from that literature. Both concerns are addressed in this talk.I first describe the salient properties of the words classified as “ideophone” both in my work and in previous research (e.g., Ajello & Melis 2008). Then, I review definitions of the concept “ideophone” in order to answer the question whether the Gizey words classified as ideophones are indeed ideophones. I argue that ideophonicity (see Kabore 1993), to be defined as the ability of a word to depict sensory experiences (via different form-meaning mappings), manifests itself in Gizey. I also argue that ideophonicity occurs across different word classes. Thus, ideophones do not constitute a single word class in Gizey as previous literature suggests.