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Chapter 6. Towards a semantic typological classification of motion ideophones

The motion semantic grid*
  • Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
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Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives
This chapter is in the book Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives

Abstract

Motion ideophones are ubiquitous across languages. They expressively enact the way a motion event takes place. The main goal of this chapter is to offer a working proposal to classify motion ideophones from a semantic typological perspective. After a description of motion ideophones, the semantic grid for motion ideophones is presented. This consists of 7 first-level components plus 26 second-level and 121 third-level sub-components. The second part comprises two studies: a first-level analysis of 453 Basque motion ideophones and a fine-grained subcomponent analysis on a selection of 186 motion ideophones from 16 genetically and geographically different languages. The last section discusses the usefulness and applicability of this type of semantic typological classifications.

Abstract

Motion ideophones are ubiquitous across languages. They expressively enact the way a motion event takes place. The main goal of this chapter is to offer a working proposal to classify motion ideophones from a semantic typological perspective. After a description of motion ideophones, the semantic grid for motion ideophones is presented. This consists of 7 first-level components plus 26 second-level and 121 third-level sub-components. The second part comprises two studies: a first-level analysis of 453 Basque motion ideophones and a fine-grained subcomponent analysis on a selection of 186 motion ideophones from 16 genetically and geographically different languages. The last section discusses the usefulness and applicability of this type of semantic typological classifications.

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