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Gizey Onomatopoeia

par Guitang, Guillaume ;Akumbu Wuchu, Pius
Référence Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (56: aug-sept 2023: Athens)
Publication Non publié, 2023

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Languages use certain sounds for specific referents (Taitz et al. 2018), such that “a sound unit such as a phoneme, syllable, feature, or tone is said to go beyond its linguistic function as a contrastive, nonmeaning-bearing unit, to directly express some kind of meaning” (Nuckolls 1999: 228). In Gizey (Masa < Chadic < Afroasiatic), spoken in Cameroon and Chad, expressives denoting SOUND, i.e., onomatopoeia, show a remarkable propensity for monovocalicity, and the vowel /i/ occurs more frequently than the other 4 vowels (u, ɛ, ɔ, and a) of the Gizey vowel inventory, e.g., brìt ‘sound of pooing’, gìndìm ‘loud sound, especially of a gunshot’. The inventory of vowels in Gizey onomatopoeia suggests that the language associates, somewhat conventionally, the vowel /i/ with SOUND. However, /i/ also occurs in other expressives not denoting SOUND, and there is evidence elsewhere in the grammar that /i/ is utilised as a default vowel. The prevalence of /i/ in onomatopoeia could then be accounted for by assuming that it (/i/) is inserted as a default vowel to satisfy constraints on the occurrence of vowelless word forms in Gizey. Accordingly, the semantic load of the onomatopoeia having /i/ as their unique vowel is born exclusively by consonants.Gizey onomatopoeia also reveal that a few phonesthemic associations can be established in the language, namely (1) coda stops are recurrent in brief or single sound-events, e.g., ɓád ‘sound of wood breaking’, and (2) coda liquids usually describe extended or prolonged sound-events, e.g. ʤɛ̀r: ‘sound of oil while frying’. Extended or prolonged sound-events may also be expressed using repetition, e.g., fágá fágá fágá ‘sound of bird flying away’. In this study we propose a detailed description of Gizey onomatopoeia based on data from Ajello & Melis (2008), supplemented by those collected by the first author in 2019.