Ideophones, Adverbs, and Predicate Qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac

Bibliographic Data

ID4559622
AuthorsDavid Beck (0000-0001-8422-7728, University of Alberta, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume74
Issue1
Pages1-46
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of American Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7071 • E-ISSN: 1545-7001
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/529462
OpenAlexW1981191175
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited26

Ideophones—sometimes called “expressives”—are familiar from descriptions of African languages and are now relatively well documented in a number of languages of Eurasia, Oceania, and Australia. This paper examines ideophones in Upper Necaxa Totonac, a Mesoamerican language, details a number of their distinctive phonological, morphological, and semantic properties, and compares these with the properties of more traditional‐looking adverbs. While ideophones do turn out to be distinguishable from adverbs on some grounds, in terms of their syntax they are shown not to be distinct, leading to the conclusion that ideophones in this language are best treated in terms of their part‐of‐speech classification as part of an overarching class of adverbial predicate‐qualifiers

Adverbial · Linguistics · Onomatopoeia · Predicate (mathematical logic · Semantic property · Syntax · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies