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Ideophonic patterns in Kiranti languages and beyond

  • Aimée Lahaussois ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 6, 2023
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Abstract

This article looks at descriptions of ideophones in Kiranti (Sino-Tibetan, Eastern Nepal) languages. It will do so by first providing a description of the ideophones of Thulung, for which four distinct ideophone types are identified, on the basis of a 10 h narrative corpus. Next, the results of this analysis will be compared to descriptions of ideophonic lexemes in sources on other Kiranti languages. In order to place these topics within an areal perspective, descriptions of the same phenomena in Nepali, the contact language for the linguistic area in question, will also be looked at. The goal of the article is to present data on the ideophonic patterns found in the Kiranti linguistic area and to consider the question of borrowing for ideophones in the Himalayas.


Corresponding author: Aimée Lahaussois, Université Paris Cité and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CNRS, Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, F-75013 Paris, France, E-mail:

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following colleagues for very helpful and insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article: Yvonne Treis, Julie Marsault, members of the Labex EFL working group on ideophones and interjections, Bonnie McLean, an anonymous reviewer, and the journal’s editors. The seeds for this work were presented at a workshop on ideophones and interjections at the SLE meeting in Leipzig in 2019. This work was supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université Paris Cité – ANR-18-IDEX-0001.

Non-Leipzig abbreviations

conj

conjunction

ideo

ideophone

int

intensifier

hab

habitual

hs

hearsay

com

comitative

temp

temporal marker

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Received: 2022-04-05
Accepted: 2022-10-24
Published Online: 2023-02-06
Published in Print: 2023-04-25

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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