Ideophones and depictive constructions: Towards an explanation of functional overlap

Abstract

This thesis attempts to account for the functional overlap that exists between ideophones and depictive secondary predicates. Discussions of depictives are largely absent from the functional and typological literature, and there is much still to elucidate with regard to the typology of ideophones. The thesis identifies the commonalities and differences between ideophones and depictives at each level of linguistic structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) with reference to a genetically and areally diverse sample of languages. I argue that this functional overlap is due to a similarity in pragmatics, whereby both depictives and ideophones occur relatively infrequently and thus are used to signal information that is in some way unexpected and thereby catch a listener’s attention. It is manifested through similarities in semantic domains and word classes: depictives and ideophones typically encode states, which are often evoked through an appeal to the senses and tend to be conveyed through the same word classes in different languages. The thesis provides an illustration of the interrelatedness of different levels of structure and most significantly how pragmatic considerations have consequences for semantics and syntax.