Teko Ideophones: description of a word class
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2785-0943/16117Keywords:
parts of speech, phonosymbolism, prosody, reduplication, pause, expressivityAbstract
The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive description of the ideophones of Teko, a Tupi language spoken in French Guiana. This word class, previously only briefly described, is defined in this paper through a systematic comparison to nouns and verbs, at various levels: phonology, word structure, prosody, semantic, morphology, syntax and discourse use. When relevant, it offers quantitative analyses with statistical tests to support the comparison. The analysis is based on a lexical database of 177 ideophones, 420 occurrences in texts and a subset of 101 tokens with audio-recording. It particularly investigates in detail various aspects of prosody, including syllabic structure, pitch, intensity and duration, and pauses. Contrary to the common view on ideophones that postulates a rather marginal status of the latter, this paper shows that ideophones are in fact rather well integrated in the linguistic system of Teko. They yet show regularities that require to consider them a distinct word category. This paper aims at contributing to the growing literature on the cross-linguistic definition and description of ideophones.
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