Words like
"ratzfatz", "ruckzuck" or "pille-palle" are known
as ideophones. Found primarily in spoken language, their role in the language
system has scarcely been researched so far. A young linguist at Goethe
University wants to change that. She is writing her doctoral thesis on the
semantics and pragmatics of ideophones.
FRANKFURT. Natural languages are considered
"arbitrary": linguistic signs and their meaning stand in a free
relationship to each other and are not based on similarity. As such, someone
who does not know the word "book" cannot infer its meaning from either
the word's form or its nature.
However, there are also signs with iconic
properties that can be used to infer meaning without prior knowledge. One
example is gestures and facial expressions: As companions to spoken language,
they introduce additional meaningful content. Then there are ideophones 鈥� words
that describe meaning by way of 鈥減ainting a sound"; usually they consist of noises
or movements. An ideophone can be a verb, an adjective, or an adverb; it
describes manner, color, sound, smell, action, state, or intensity. Ideophones
are particularly common in African languages, much less so in German. Although
they do exist here, too: "zickzack", "holterdiepolter",
"ratzfatz", "pille-palle" or "plemplem". These
are the kinds of words Kathryn Barnes is interested in.
Not only are they the subject of her
dissertation, which she is currently writing, but also of an article recently
published in the linguistic journal "Glossa". Her thesis is
supervised by linguist Prof. Cornelia Ebert, who coordinates the
inter-university German Research Foundation's (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,
DFG) "Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical and Applied
Perspectives (ViCom)" research program. With regard to gestures, Ebert has
found that they convey meaning on a different level than arbitrary signs. They
are less likely to be questioned by the communicative counterpart. Barnes is
now exploring whether this can be applied to ideophones.
"Such supposedly special cases can
tell us a lot about how language works," Barnes says. Because of the
pandemic, Barnes had to carry out the survey on which her study is based as an
online experiment. All told, some 40 native German speakers completed the
questionnaire, designed to shed light on the usage (pragmatics) and meaning
(semantics) of 20 ideophones.
One example uses a scene from 鈥淭he Frog
Prince", where the frog climbs 鈥� plitschplatsch
鈥� the stairs to the castle. In one
example, he was previously described as wet, in the other, he was described as
having been completely dried out by the sun by the time he arrived at the
stairs. When the ideophone plitschplatsch
was used, the subjects were still able to accept the description even though the
statement actually seems illogical. The situation was different when an adverb
was used 鈥� much like in the case of gestures, participants expressed less
objection to the error when an ideophone was used.
"As far as I know, this is the first
experimental work done with German speakers on the at-issue status of
ideophones 鈥� and one of the very few ever on the information status of
ideophones," says Prof. Cornelia Ebert. In German, at any rate,
ideophones, which are used like sentence elements, are "not at issue"
鈥� that is, their truth content is not questioned to the same extent as that of
other sentence elements. It remains to be seen whether the insights derived on
the basis of German-language ideophones can also be transferred to other
languages, especially to those in which the use of ideophones is much more
common than in German.
But why do ideophones (like gestures) have
a higher credibility? Is it because they create images in the mind, i.e. they
are perceived on a different level of understanding? Kathryn Barnes wants to
explore this further, and also include other languages in her research, such as
Spanish.
Publication:
Barnes, K. R. & Ebert, C. & H枚rnig, R. & Stender, T., (2022) 鈥淭he
at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach", Glossa: a
journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi:
Further information
Kathryn Barnes
Research Associate
Institute for Linguistics
51猎奇
Tel: +49 (0)69
798-32401
barnes@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
