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Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution

  • Giovanna Di Paola , Ljiljana Progovac and Antonio Benítez-Burraco ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: May 24, 2024
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

Ideophones stand out as promising constructions to be considered as linguistic “fossils”. Allegedly, this is due to some of their distinctive features, including their sound-symbolic nature, ample use of reduplication, reliance on the simplest combinatorial processes, attachment to emotional content, and presumed bootstrapping effects on language acquisition. These features might exhibit some continuity with primate communication systems, including the co-occurrence with gestures. Because the nature and complexity of ideophones in modern languages can vary significantly from culture to culture, in this paper, we focus on their links with cross-modality, and ultimately, on how they are processed by the brain and how our brain evolved. We embed our analysis in the framework of the human self-domestication hypothesis, according to which human evolution was characterized by a gradual decrease in reactive aggression, which had an impact on our cognitive and behavioural features. Our framework implicates the cortico-striatal brain networks, whose enhanced connectivity is a mechanism for both the suppression of reactive aggression, and for cross-modality and language processing more generally. In conclusion, even though present-day ideophones can certainly show many new complexities, some of their most basic features can be reconstructed as approximations of early (but not archaic), creative uses of language.

Keywords: ideophones; sound symbolism; cross-modality; human self-domestication; language evolution
Corresponding author: Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Spanish, Linguistics, and Theory of Literature (Linguistics), Universidad de Sevilla Facultad de Filologia, C/ Palos de la Frontera s/n, 41004, Seville, Spain, E-mail:

Funding source: MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

Award Identifier / Grant number: PID2020-114516GB-I00

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Received: 2023-08-28
Accepted: 2024-01-05
Published Online: 2024-05-24

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0127
Keywords for this article
ideophones; sound symbolism; cross-modality; human self-domestication; language evolution

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  30. Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
  31. Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
  33. Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
  34. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  35. How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
  36. Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
  37. Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
  38. On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
  39. The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
  40. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  41. A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
  42. Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
  43. “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
  44. Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
  45. Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
  46. Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
  47. What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
  48. From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
  49. Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
  50. Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
  51. Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
  52. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  53. Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin
  54. Finding continuers in Swedish Sign Language
  55. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
  56. Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
  57. Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
  58. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
  59. The Red Hen Audio Tagger
  60. Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
  61. Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
  62. Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
  63. Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
  64. Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
  65. Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
  66. The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
  67. Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
  68. Cognitive Linguistics
  69. Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
  70. Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
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