Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sense Relations And Sensory Clustering In Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are sound-imitative words that simulate senses, perceptions, and emotions. Using archived, audiovisual data consisiting of over 500 ideophones utterances from the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonia Ecuador acquired over the last 6 years of fieldwork, I argue that although ideophone semantics have been charatierized as highly specific, semantic generalization and structred semantic realtions such as a synonymy, antonymy and homonymy may be found when a sizable corpus is available. Semantic regualrity and stucture are hypothesized to be linked with a senory clustering effect whereby more sensory modalities encoded within an ideophone generate more possibilited for sense relations and semantic …

Rethinking Mono-Sensory, Implicational Approaches To Ideophones In Pastaza Quichua, Janis B. Nuckolls, Sydney Jensen, Emily Peterson, Matthew Millar

Faculty Publications

This paper will evaluate a claim about a possible areal bias for the semantic typolgies of ideohone systems. According to this claim, ideophone systems of the Americas are mainly dedicatied to encoding sound and motion, while for Africa and Asia, they cover a broader range of sensory imagery , including visual patterns, textures, and cognitive states. Additionally, and implicational hieracry for ideophone systems' se,amtics has been posted. We demonstrate with data from Pasta Quichua, that ideophones' semantics span the full range of senory and cognitive possibilities. Further, the mono-sensory schematization of ideophones' semantics make the implicational hierarchy problematic as presently …

Lexicography In-Your-Face: The Active Semantics Of Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice, Sarah Hatton

Faculty Publications

English:

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language’s ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts …

The Systematic Stretching And Contracting Of Ideophonic Phonology In Pastaza Quichua, Joseph A. Stanley, Janis B. Nuckolls, Elizabeth Nielsen, Roseanna Hopper

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes systematic differences between sounds used in ideophones and sounds used in the non-ideophonic or “prosaic” lexicon of the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. We compare a digitized corpus of vocabulary items with a list of ideophones identified from field observations. We find that if a sound, syllable structure, or stress pattern is distributionally restricted in Pastaza Quichua, it is likely to be normalized and expanded within ideophones. The overall system is also stretched among ideophones by the addition of new sounds to the obstruents. These expansions are complemented by an overall contraction among sonorant sounds within …

The Sound-Symbolic Expression Of Animacy In Amazonian Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Several anthropologists of Amazonian societies in Ecuador have claimed that for Achuar [1] and Quichua speaking Runa [2,3,4] there is no fundamental distinction between humans on the one hand, and plants and animals on the other. A related observation is that Runa and Achuar people share an animistic cosmology whereby animals, plants, and even seemingly inert entities such as rocks and stones are believed to have a life force or essence with a subjectivity that can be expressed. This paper will focus on Quichua speaking Runa to seek linguistic evidence for animacy by examining the sound-symbolic properties of a class …