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Reduplication, Ideophones, And Onomatoepoeic Repetition In The Yanomami Languages, Gale Goodwin Gomez

Gale Goodwin Gomez

The morphological process of reduplication occurs throughout the Yanomami languages of northern Amazonia. Onomatopoeia and the repetition of morphemes of apparent ideophonic origin are also common in the four major subgroups of the Yanomami language family: Yanomami, Yanomae, Sanuma, and Yanam. Reduplication has been specifically mentioned in grammatical descriptions of Yanomami (Ramirez 1994), Sanuma (Borgman 1990) and Yanam (Gómez 1990). Documentation of the Yanomami languages is ongoing, and grammatical descriptions are incomplete. Nevertheless, data from a thematic lexicon of Yanomae (Albert and Gómez, in prep.) highlights the frequent repetition of onomatopoeic forms, especially in relation to body movements, bodily functions, …