Abstract
This article provides an overview of the special issue, which centers on two subtopics, (i) the lexical semantics of âmotion ideophonesâ and (ii) ideophones in âmotion descriptionsâ, inspired by Talmyâs (1985, 1991, 2000) theory of Motion events. A brief introduction to the five contributions of the special issue is followed by a summary of the main findings. First, the application of the motion semantic grid (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019) to analyze motion ideophones shows an unexpected contrast: literary Chinese texts abound in motion ideophones, whereas ideophonic roots with default motional semantics are scarce in Khalkha Mongolian. Second, an analysis of motion descriptions shows while there are some cross-linguistic similarities (e.g., four of the languages investigated are verb-framed languages), language-specific features figure more prominently in terms of how ideophones interact with the other components of a sentence.
1 Introduction
Ideophones are defined as âmember[s] of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imageryâ (Dingemanse, 2019: 16). The literature on ideophones has grown rapidly in recent decades (see, e.g., Lahaussois, Marsault, and Treis, 2024; Akita, 2019), but certain topics require further attention. One is the semantics of ideophones pertaining to âmotionâ. This special issue collectively investigates how ideophones participate in the descriptions of motion through the lens of cognitive semantics and typology, with a special focus on two subtopics: (i) the lexical semantics of âmotion ideophonesâ (i.e., ideophones with a motion-related meaning), and (ii) ideophones in the description of a motion (âmotion descriptionsâ henceforth), including but not limited to Talmyâs (1985, 1991, 2000) sense of a Motion event. In Talmyâs understanding, a Motion event is expressed by a single clause consisting of four internal semantic components â Motion, Figure, Path, and Ground â together conveying an event wherein a Figure moves translationally along a Path (or is located) with respect to the Ground. The event can have a Co-event as an external component, and it typically has a Manner or a Cause relationship with the main Motion (Talmy, 2007: 70â71).
In what follows, Section 2 outlines the two subtopics, and Section 3 gives a brief introduction to the five contributions. Section 4 summarizes the findings for each subtopic.
2 Intersection of Ideophones and Motion Descriptions
2.1 Lexical Semantics of Motion Ideophones
In the latter part of the 20th century, the lexical semantics of motion ideophones was recognized as a research area requiring systematic investigation (Samarin, 1965: 118â119), but this idea was not pursued until recently when Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2019) proposed âthe motion semantic gridâ, a tool that can be used for a cross-linguistic survey of the meanings of motion ideophones. The grid is a taxonomic system organized into three levels, with each level containing non-exhaustive categories of motion-related meaning components. The first-level contains seven semantic components (e.g., figure, motion), six of which are borrowed from Talmyâs (1985, 2000) semantic primitives of Motion events. Each component consists of finer sub-categories, into which the meaning of a motion ideophone can be decomposed. For example, the Chinese fÄnfÄn (ç¿ç¿) âfloat and flutter, drift with the wind (of birds)â can be analyzed as consisting of figure: non-human, manner: motor-pattern = fly, ground: gaseous (see Van Hoey, this special issue). Despite its innovation and potential, the motion semantic grid has only been applied to Teko, a Tupian language (Rose, 2024) and Basque (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019). This special issue seeks to expand the application to see what lies at the core of the semantics of motion ideophones.
2.2 Ideophones in Motion Descriptions
In an interview by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2005), Talmy remarked on the issue with reference to his framing typology (verb-framed vs. satellite-framed). He made two main points: (i) ideophones can be added to the list of constituents that can characteristically represent Manner in Motion events, and (ii) ideophones that specify Manner seem to occur only in verb-framed languages (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2005: 344; Schaefer, 2001: 350).
Further, various questions can be asked to discern how ideophones participate in a description of motion. For example, with which elements do ideophones typically co-occur? Is there a clear (un-)sharing between the ideophone and the other co-occurring elements in terms of the semantic coverage? Do ideophones play a part in boosting manner salience (cf. Akita, 2017)? In this special issue, each contribution adopts its own way to examine how ideophones participate in describing a motion. For example, Ibarretxe-Antuñano poses rarely asked questions involving sociolinguistic aspects of the usage of ideophones.
3 The Contributions
This special issue starts with Thomas Van Hoeyâs contribution, focusing on the lexical semantics of motion ideophones. Van Hoey analyzes motion ideophones found in literary Chinese, not only using the motion semantic grid but also innovatively applying a statistical tool: multiple correspondence analysis. Van Hoey reports the relevance of all the first-level components to his data and gives details on which semantic components come into play in the lower-level components, critically assessing the effectiveness of the grid as a tool for cross-linguistic applications.
The contribution by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano evaluates factors that might explain the usage of Basque motion ideophones in three databases, arguing speakers use motion ideophones across contexts irrespective of age, diatopic variation, and mode type (oral vs. written). Ibarretxe-Antuñano also suggests the large inventory of Manner-of-motion ideophones in Basque may prompt speakers to include Manner information in motion descriptions more frequently than the speakers of other verb-framed languages (e.g., Spanish).
In his article, Yo Matsumoto presents a corpus-based statistical account (N = 2,429) of what types of predicates Japanese motion ideophones co-occur with. He finds motion ideophones occur disproportionally more frequently with manner verbs than with any other types of verbs. Matsumoto also applies the motion semantic grid (revised) to analyze representative motion ideophones, noting the meaning of a motion ideophone is not a simple sum of all the semantic components but is obtained as a âgestaltâ.
The article by Kazuhiro Kawachi examines the use of ideophones in two typologically distinct languages: Kupsapiiny (Nilotic; Uganda) and Sidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia). Kawachi evaluates two hypotheses based on Schaefer (2001), one pertaining to verb-framed languages and the other to the inventory size of ideophones with respect to manner of motion verbs, rejecting both hypotheses. Kawachi discusses how sound (for Kupsapiiny) and postural change (Sidaama) are more relevant than manners (e.g., âwalk slowlyâ) to the descriptions of motion expressed by ideophones in these languages.
Finally, Veronika Zikmundová, Jan KÅivan, VÃt Ulman, and Veronika KapiÅ¡ovská investigate how Khalkha Mongolian uses ideophones in motion descriptions. The authors bring to light a unique feature of this language: none of the ideophonic roots is lexically encoded with a meaning of motion, but motion semantics is obtainable when an ideophonic root is combined with a derivational suffix. Zikmundová et al. analyze the meaning of the derived forms of ideophones by applying the motion semantic grid and investigate how such ideophones are used in motion descriptions highlighting different aspects of motion (e.g., speed).
4 Discussion
4.1 Motion Semantic Grid
One of the most intriguing findings of this collection is that Khalkha Mongolian has no ideophonic roots that entail motion (Zikmundová et al., this special issue). While Zikmundová et al. still use the motion semantic grid to analyze descriptions of motion, as they construe the sense of motion can arise by combining an ideophonic root with a grammatical suffix, the Khalkha Mongolian data go against the commonly assumed characteristics of ideophones, wherein motion is part of their meaning (Samarin, 1965: 118; Hinton et al., 1994: 4; Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019).
Another intriguing finding is that motion ideophones commonly embrace multiple semantic components (cf. Nuckolls, 2019), as in literary Chinese, and Japanese (Van Hoey, and Matsumoto, respectively, this special issue). Among the first-level components, motion ideophones with the components of manner and figure seem conspicuous in these languages. This concentration seems reasonable, as motion necessarily involves a moving entity [figure] that moves in a particular way [manner] (Van Hoey, this special issue). Yet while manner ranks high in Basque, figure ranks lower (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019), suggesting the distribution varies across languages.
The application of the motion semantic grid raises interesting methodological issues. Matsumoto (this special issue) suggests a simplified version with different groupings of components. Van Hoey (this special issue) argues for a need to test the original version with more typologically distinct languages to finalize the necessary adjustments.
4.2 Ideophones in the Descriptions of Motion Events and Beyond
Two questions can be formulated based on Talmyâs observations (cf. Section 2.2). The first is: Is Manner the only relation represented by ideophones in Motion events? This question is particularly important as it responds to Talmyâs comment that âresearch on the Motion typology has mainly addressed only Manner from the full set of framing relationsâ (2017: 1; for framing/Co-event relations, see Talmy, 2000: 42â47).
Of the five contributions, the article by Zikmundová et al. specifically asks which Co-event relations an ideophone can have with respect to the main Motion event. They report that in their 100 examples of Khalkha Mongolian motion descriptions, 83 express Manner, whereas 13 instances can be judged as expressing Precursion; several instances of Manner can be judged alternatively as Concomitance. While their result shows Manner is still the most dominant relation, it seems safe to conclude Manner is not the only relation ideophones represent (for non-Manner relations in Japanese, see Toratani (2012)).
The second question is: Are ideophones that participate in Motion event descriptions limited to those belonging to verb-framed languages? The answer must be negative because while Basque, Japanese, Sidaama and Khalkha Mongolian are classed as verb-framed languages, Kupsapiiny is described as an âanti-verb-framed (non-head path-coding) languageâ whose single verb constructions show a satellite-framed language pattern (Kawachi, this special issue).1 A much larger pool of languages must be evaluated to determine the relevance of the use of ideophones in Motion event descriptions to the framing typology. We need to ask why there is a concentration on the verb-framed languages, if indeed there is a concentration.
Importantly, all verb-framed languages do not behave equally in terms of the deployment of ideophones in motion descriptions. Japanese and Basque have a similar pattern; ideophones typically function as adjuncts, preceding and modifying their clause-mate verb. On the other hand, Khalkha Mongolian ideophones require suffixes to express a motion. In Sidaama, ideophones function as a main verb or a converb, followed by a do/say verb (Kawachi, this special issue; cf. Treis, 2024: 154). Differently put, while ideophones can certainly function as a Co-event-expressing constituent in languages like Japanese and Basque (e.g., Example (3) in Ibarretxe-Antuñano, this special issue), the framing typology per se does not govern the appearance of ideophones in motion descriptions.
As the contributions in the special issue jointly illustrate, languages differ in how they employ ideophones to describe a motion: ideophones can be used adverbially, predicatively, or holophrastically to depict various types of motion: from a boundary-crossed motion to a self-contained motion. They can appear in different constructions or co-occur with various morphemes and words from different part-of-speech categories. A survey of a more diverse range of languages is called for to arrive at crosslinguistic generalizations on how ideophones participate in motion descriptions.
We end this introduction by noting that Talmyâs typology has served as a critical conceptual framework to link two formerly independent research topics, âideophonesâ and âthe language of motionâ. This linkage, in turn, inspires two new topics: âlexical semantics of motion ideophonesâ and âideophones in motion descriptionsâ.
Acknowledgments
This special issue grew out of two online workshops organized by the authors of this introductory article. Three papers were selected from the papers presented at Ideophones in motion descriptions (October 7â8, 2023). Two papers were solicited from the presenters at Workshop on typology of ideophones (June 24â25, 2022). We thank all the presenters and audiences for their engaging questions and comments. We also thank Elizabeth Thompson for her editorial assistance.
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