Ideophones and the Evolution of Language

Ideophones have been recognized in modern linguistics at least since 1935, but they still lie far outside the concerns of mainstream (Western) linguistic debate, in part because they are most richly attested in relatively unstudied (often unwritten) languages. The evolution of language, on the other hand, has recently become a fashionable topic, but all speculations so far have been almost totally data-free. Without disputing the tenet that there are no primitive languages, this book argues that ideophones may be an atavistic throwback to an earlier stage of communication, where sounds and gestures were paired in what can justifiably be called a 'prelinguistic' fashion. The structure of ideophones may also provide answers to deeper questions, among them how communicative gestures may themselves have emerged from practical actions. Moreover, their current distribution and behaviour provide hints as to how they may have become conventional words in languages with conventional rules.

Author: John Haiman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/17/2020
Pages: 393
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781107695030

About the Author
Haiman, John: - John Haiman is the author of Hua: A Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea (1980), The Rhaeto-Romance Languages (with Paola Beninca, 1992) and Cambodian: Khmer (2011). He pioneered the resurgence of interest in iconicity in language with Natural Syntax (Cambridge, 1985), and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship 1989 for the study of sarcasm, which resulted in his book Talk Is Cheap (1998).

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