Ideophones in unexpected places

Drawing from a varied corpus spanning several hours and many types of discourse, this paper presents novel facts about ideophone usage in Siwu, a Kwa language from eastern Ghana. It is divided into three parts. The first part introduces ideophones and the Siwu language. The second part provides a brief overview of the use of ideophones in day-to-day discourse and then zooms in on two ritualized genres where ideophones occur perhaps unexpectedly: funeral dirges and greeting exchanges. 1.1. Ideophones African, Asian, and to a lesser extent Am erindian languages are known for their large inventories of ideophonic vocabulary (Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001). Ideophony is a slippery notion (Childs 1994), definitions of which usually either focus on the grammatical status of ideophones or on their sound-symbolic nature (Kulemeka 1995). I employ a definition of ideophones which subverts this opposition by being broad enough to serve as a general cross-linguistic characterization of ideophonic phenomena while leaving room for the details to be spelled out for specific languages. Its elements are not intended as a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather serve to define the possibility space in a way inspired by canonical typology (Corbett 2005). (1) Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events. Let me briefly elaborate on the elements of the definition. Ideophones are marked in the simple sense that they stand out from other words in several ways, including special phonotactics, expressive morphology, syntactic aloofness, and prosodic foregrounding. Ideophones are words (as opposed to, say, involuntary cries or nonce words), that is, they are minimal free forms that are conventionalized and have specifiable meanings (Dingemanse in prep.). Ideophones are vivid, turning speaker into performer by transporting the narrated event into the speech event. Ideophones are depictions; that is, their mode of signification is primarily depictive rather than descriptive. Depiction implies iconicity, a perceived resemblance between form and meaning and indeed many ideophones are iconic (sound-symbolic) at several levels. Finally, ideophones 1 I thank Ɔɖime Kanairɔ, Ruben and Ella Owiafe, and Rev. A.Y. Wurapa for teaching me about their language in Akpafu-Mempeasem; Timothy ‘T.T.’ Akuamoah for initiating the 2008 documentation event in Akpafu-Todzi; and Kofi Agawu for making available an important collection of dirges recorded in 1986. For comments on an earlier version, I would like to thank Felix Ameka, Nick Enfield, John Haiman, Gunter Senft, Jenneke van der Wal, and Connie de Vos.