Ideophones in Motion Descriptions


Online Workshop: October 7-8, 2023 (UTC+9)

Meeting Description

An ideophone is defined as “[a] member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019: 16). It has been noted that ideophones are used in motion descriptions expressing ‘manner’, with reference to Talmy’s (1985, 2000) two-category typology (verb-framed languages vs. satellite-framed languages), for instance, in Awetí (Reiter 2013), Basque (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2015), Changana (Menete, 2022), and Thai and Telugu (Naidu et al. 2018). While these studies reveal ideophones play a part in motion descriptions of some languages, as their focus is not on ideophones, more work is required to know precisely how ideophones participate in motion descriptions.

The workshop brings together researchers of ideophones and specialists of understudied languages with ideophones to explore the morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of ideophones used in motion descriptions, such as (1), considering whether cross-linguistic generalizations can be drawn from them.

(1) a.    Pastaza Quechua

Pollhang   wamburi-n, rik-i  !

IDEO     float-3         look-2IMP

‘Look! He [the anaconda] rises pollhang.’ (Nuckolls 1996: 157)

polang: ‘Describes the moment of emergence from underwater to the surface’ (Nuckolls 1996: 155)

  b. Japanese

 Chichi-wa kosokoso-to …    hait-te-it-ta

            father-TOP IDEO.stealthily-p      enter-GER-go-PAST

             ‘My father went into (the place) stealthily (away from me).’

The discussion is intended to be descriptive and morphosyntactic-theory-neutral. While part of the discussion may draw on Talmy’s (1985, 2000) idea on Motion events, we construe ‘motion’ more broadly, covering both translational motion (wherein an entity travels from one location to another: e.g., ‘enter’, ‘cross’) and self-contained motion (wherein the entity can remain in one place in approximation: e.g., ‘spin’, ‘sway’). We welcome new ways to analyse use of ideophones in spatial motion descriptions beyond Talmy (1985, 2000).

 

The workshop will take place using the Zoom platform on October 7-8, 2023, with a mixture of “live” and “pre-recorded” presentation deliveries.

Plenary Speaker


·       We are privileged to invite Dr. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Universidad de Zaragoza) as our plenary speaker.


Call for papers

We invite submissions for an online presentation (20 min. talk + 10 min. Q&A), addressing the following (and related) questions.

·       Morphosyntax:

-What constitutes the morpho-syntactic environment of an ideophone in the description of a motion scene? Points to be considered include: the position of the ideophone in the clause structure with respect to the position of the verb, ideophones’ part-of-speech category status, possibility of co-occurrence with a ‘do’/‘say’ verb or other light verbs, ability to take grammatical markers, involvement of ‘expressive morphology’ (Zwicky and Pullum 1987), relevance of grammatical integration (Dingemanse and Akita 2017).

·       Semantics:

-What kinds of verbs do ideophones co-occur with in the description of a motion scene (path verbs vs. manner verbs, in terms of Aktionsart classes, or any other classifications)? Do all ideophones have tight collocational restrictions with these verbs?

-What type of semantic relations does the ideophone have with the predicate with which it is in construction? Do ideophones always express a secondary event, while the verb expresses the main motion event? Which work best captures the semantic relations, Talmy (2000: 42-47), Van Valin (2005: 206-207), or any other?

-Do ideophones always have to express a motion when they are used in motion descriptions? What types of semantic components do the ideophones have (e.g., sound, psyche) to participate in motion descriptions? See Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2019) for a detailed classification of semantic components of ideophones.

-Do ideophones have an impact on “manner saliency” (e.g., Slobin 2006) in the description of a motion scene?


Dates:

·   Deadline for submission of an anonymous abstract (500 words including examples but excluding references, tables, and figures):

    August 14, 2023 (Anywhere on Earth), e-mailed to: ktora [at] yorku.ca (no space, and replace [at] with the symbol).

Submissions can be one single-authored and one co-authored abstract or two co-authored abstracts.

·   The Call for Papers is closed. Thank you for your submission. The acknowledgement of receipt was sent within a day after the receipt of your submission.


·   Notification: August 21, 2023 (UTC +9)


·   Dates of the online workshop via Zoom: October 7-8, 2023 (UTC +9)


References

Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept. In K. Akita and P. Pardeshi, (eds.), Ideophones, Mimetics, and Expressives, 13-33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Dingemanse, Mark, and Kimi Akita. 2017. An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese. Journal of Linguistics, 53(3), 501-532.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2015. Going beyond motion events typology: the case of Basque as a verb-framed language. Folia Linguistica, 49(2), 207-352.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2019. Towards a semantic typological classification of motion ideophones: The motion semantic grid. In K. Akita and P. Pardeshi, (eds.), Ideophones, Mimetics, and Expressives, 137-166. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Menete, Sérgio N. 2022. Motion events in Changana spoken narrative. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 40(3), 251-274, DOI: 10.2989/16073614.2022.2058037

Naidu, Viswanatha, Zlatev, Jordan, Duggirala, Vasanta, Van De Weijer, Joost, Devylder, Simon and Blomberg, Johan. 2018. Holistic spatial semantics and post-Talmian motion event typology: A case study of Thai and Telugu. Cognitive Semiotics, 11(2), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2018-2002 

Reiter, Sabine. 2013.The multi-modal representation of motion events in Awetí discourse. CogniTextes, 9, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.4000/cognitextes.765

Slobin, Dan. 2006. What makes manner of motion salient?: explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition. In M. Hickmann & R.S. Robert (eds.), Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, 59-81. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Lexical Description, Vol. III, Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 36-149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zwicky, Arnold, and Geoffrey Pullum. 1987. Plain morphology and expressive morphology. BLS13, 330-340.

Workshop co-organizers & contact

-Kiyoko Toratani (York University)

-Kimi Akita (Nagoya University)