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Haitian Creole Ideophones: An Exploratory Analysis, Marc Prou

Marc E. Prou

This article is an exploratory attempt to analyze the status of Creole ideophones through distinctive repetition, reduplication and onomatopoeic features of Haitian Creole, commonly known as Kreyol. It examines barious types of ideophones in Kreyol with the aim of understanding the processes of change in lexical categories, which involve the principles these processes manifest-- thereby showing, on the one hand, why these diverse types of ideophones should be classed together and referred to with a single term, 'ideophonization'; and, on the other hand, how this category of lexical items is to be distinguished from others.