The dance of expressive adverbials (“ideophones”) in Jamsay (Dogon)
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Jeffrey Heath
Abstract
In addition to nouns, adjectives, numerals, postpositions, and verbs, Dogon languages such as Jamsay have an open-ended class of expressive adverbials (EAs). EAs partially overlap with what have been called ideophones or mimetics in other languages, but these labels conceal a range of grammatical statuses. EAs have no fixed position within larger syntactic phrases except as predicates. Unlike other constituents, they cannot be syntactically focalized, and they cannot be targeted by tonosyntactic operations. However, EAs do have a mini-morphosyntax of their own. All three of nouns, adjectives, and EAs can be made predicative, but the three use different morphosyntactic frames. Under limited conditions, an EA can fuse into a compound with a preceding noun or numeral that it is closely associated with. Most importantly, ordinary adjectives and numerals are convertible into EAs by morphological processes. In sum, Jamsay EAs constitute a distinct stem-class that functions as part of the grammar, but in a uniquely Dogon manner.
Acknowledgements
Fieldwork on Jamsay was funded primarily by National Endowment for the Humanities grant PA 50643-04 (2004–2006). Expansion of the fieldwork to other Dogon languages, which has significantly influenced the analysis of Jamsay EAs in this paper, has been funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0537435, BCS-0853364, and BCS 1263150 (collectively 2006–2018). I thank two journal referees for stimulating comments. Above all I thank my long-time project assistant Minkailou Djiguiba.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The dance of expressive adverbials (“ideophones”) in Jamsay (Dogon)
- Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian
- The Great Complement Shift and the role of understood subjects: The case of fearful
- Inclusory pronouns in Mande: The emergence of a typological rarum
- Genre-related language change: Discourse- and corpus-linguistic perspectives on Austrian German 1970–2010
- Variation in the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: Gender and social class
- Article-like constructions and the definite-indefinite continuum in Croatian
- The variation of calques in European languages, with particular reference to Spanish and German: Main patterns and trends
- Book Reviews
- Laurie Bauer: Compounds and compounding
- Elisa Mattielo: Analogy in word-formation: A study of English neologisms and occasionalisms
- Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray: Grammatical complexity in academic English
