Janis Nuckolls
Biographic Data
| ID | 176867 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Janis Nuckolls |
| GIVEN NAMES | Janis |
| FAMILY NAME | Nuckolls |
| SIGNATURE | NUCKOLLS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brigham Young University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2003-3876 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Neurological evidence for the context-independent multisensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: An fNirs study in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categoriz…
The Mindful Animism of Ideophony in Pastaza and Upper Napo Kichwa
This paper proposes a novel perspective for thinking about ideophones, which are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions and emotions with linguistic sounds and with so-called "paralinguistic" features, especially gesture and intonation. By considering their performative and depictive qualities with concepts from mindfulness and meditative practices, it is argued that a contemplative, mindful impulse underlies their use by Kichwa-spe…
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia are words that exhibit sound symbolism by imitating a range of sensory perceptions, including sounds, movements, and images. Within the English‐speaking world the term “onomatopoeia” has undergone fluctuations in its valorization over time, which have had an effect on current research today. It enjoyed a prestigious rhetorical status during the Renaissance and was part of early pedagogical texts' representations of language, the sens…
How do you even know what ideophones mean?”: Gestures’ contributions to ideophone semantics in Quichua
Using data from the Northern Pastaza (qvc) and Upper Napo Quichua (quw) dialects of Amazonian Ecuador, this paper argues that the semantics of ideophones, a highly marked form class of expressive words, is principled and describable with a combination of sensori-semantic features and a fine-grained typology of gestures, based on insights from Streeck (2008) and others. Specifically, ideophones’ sensori-semantics are broken down into a semantic ma…
Examination of Manner of Motion Sound Symbolism for English Nonce Verbs
This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to…
Lexicography in-your-face: The active semantics of Pastaza Quichua ideophones
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…
The Systematic Stretching and Contracting of Ideophonic Phonology in Pastaza Quichua
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 …
Ideophones’ challenges for typological linguistics: The case of Pastaza Quichua
Typological studies of motion verbs have struggled to conceptualize a framework that would adequately account for languages which make use of ideophoness for expressing manner of motion. This paper examines ideophones in the Pastaza Quichua dialect of Amazonian Ecuador, with a special focus on the structural patterns observable in two categories of Quichua verbs of motion: verbs of motion by limited translocation and verbs of motion by nonlimited…
Earthy Concreteness and Anti-Hypotheticalism in Amazonian Quichua Discourse
This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please
Ok: The improbable story of America’s greatest word
There are a number of good reasons for reading OK.Anyone with only a passing interest in language will be engaged by this witty, enjoyable account of the origins of OK, as well as the competing theories about its beginnings.Allan Metcalf has devoted serious attention to the archival evidence for its improbable origins as a joking, deliberately-misspelled abbreviation for the phrase 'all correct', rendered as 'oll korrect', which first entered the…
From quotative other to quotative self: Evidential usage in Pastaza Quichua
Evidentials in Pastaza Quichua, an Amazonian dialect of Ecuadorian Quechua, are examined and their uses in narratives compared. The novel contribution of this paper is to show, by comparing data from personal experience narratives, that evidentials are used to convey speaker subjectivity, rather than source of information, and that switches between different speaker subjectivities, which may be encoded as ‘selves’ or ‘others’, are particularly ev…
Evidentials and evidential strategies in interactional and socio-cultural context
Although the grammar of evidential has revived significant descriptive, typological, and theoretical attention to since the 1980s (see surveys in Aikhenvald 2004 and Speas 2008), attention to this grammatical and functional category from scholars interested in the social, cultural, and interactional aspects of language has been more sporadic and less systematizing in nature ( see e.g., Agha 2002, Atkinson 1999, Chafe 1986, Clift 2003, Fox 2001, H…
The Case for Sound Symbolism
The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to…
Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua
Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words - words that bear resemblance to phenomena they attempt to describe - in an Ecuadorian dialect of Quechua, a major South American language. She explores how the speakers describe everyday experience and how sound-symbolism is integral to their way of thinking and speaking.
Quechua texts of perception
Recent work by anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians has made significant strides in our understanding of the dynamics and poetics of spoken utterances. Such work has been motivated, generally, by the goal of understanding verbal expression in terms of its own unique structures and expressive modalities. The following paper will contribute to this line of inquiry. It offers an analysis of a form of expression, sound symbolism, that is wi…
To Drink of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar Warrior
To Drink of Death: The Narrative of. Shuar Warrior. Janet Wall Hendricks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. 316 pp
The semantics of certainty in Quechua and its implications for a cultural epistemology
This article contributes to attempts on the part of Quechua scholars to understand the evidential system of this language family, and thereby paves the way for a more complex understanding of Quechua speakers' language and culture. The author opposes the position that the most general meaning of the -misuffix is to indicate a direct or first-hand experience; and she holds that specific claims about Quechua speakers' epistemological orientations, …
The Case for Sound Symbolism
The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to…
The Systematic Stretching and Contracting of Ideophonic Phonology in Pastaza Quichua
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 …
The semantics of certainty in Quechua and its implications for a cultural epistemology
This article contributes to attempts on the part of Quechua scholars to understand the evidential system of this language family, and thereby paves the way for a more complex understanding of Quechua speakers' language and culture. The author opposes the position that the most general meaning of the -misuffix is to indicate a direct or first-hand experience; and she holds that specific claims about Quechua speakers' epistemological orientations, …
How do you even know what ideophones mean?”: Gestures’ contributions to ideophone semantics in Quichua
Using data from the Northern Pastaza (qvc) and Upper Napo Quichua (quw) dialects of Amazonian Ecuador, this paper argues that the semantics of ideophones, a highly marked form class of expressive words, is principled and describable with a combination of sensori-semantic features and a fine-grained typology of gestures, based on insights from Streeck (2008) and others. Specifically, ideophones’ sensori-semantics are broken down into a semantic ma…
Examination of Manner of Motion Sound Symbolism for English Nonce Verbs
This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to…
Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua
Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words - words that bear resemblance to phenomena they attempt to describe - in an Ecuadorian dialect of Quechua, a major South American language. She explores how the speakers describe everyday experience and how sound-symbolism is integral to their way of thinking and speaking.
Quechua texts of perception
Recent work by anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians has made significant strides in our understanding of the dynamics and poetics of spoken utterances. Such work has been motivated, generally, by the goal of understanding verbal expression in terms of its own unique structures and expressive modalities. The following paper will contribute to this line of inquiry. It offers an analysis of a form of expression, sound symbolism, that is wi…
The semantics of certainty in Quechua and its implications for a cultural epistemology
This article contributes to attempts on the part of Quechua scholars to understand the evidential system of this language family, and thereby paves the way for a more complex understanding of Quechua speakers' language and culture. The author opposes the position that the most general meaning of the -misuffix is to indicate a direct or first-hand experience; and she holds that specific claims about Quechua speakers' epistemological orientations, …
Quechua texts of perception
Recent work by anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians has made significant strides in our understanding of the dynamics and poetics of spoken utterances. Such work has been motivated, generally, by the goal of understanding verbal expression in terms of its own unique structures and expressive modalities. The following paper will contribute to this line of inquiry. It offers an analysis of a form of expression, sound symbolism, that is wi…
To Drink of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar Warrior
To Drink of Death: The Narrative of. Shuar Warrior. Janet Wall Hendricks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. 316 pp
Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua
Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words - words that bear resemblance to phenomena they attempt to describe - in an Ecuadorian dialect of Quechua, a major South American language. She explores how the speakers describe everyday experience and how sound-symbolism is integral to their way of thinking and speaking.
The Case for Sound Symbolism
The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to…
From quotative other to quotative self: Evidential usage in Pastaza Quichua
Evidentials in Pastaza Quichua, an Amazonian dialect of Ecuadorian Quechua, are examined and their uses in narratives compared. The novel contribution of this paper is to show, by comparing data from personal experience narratives, that evidentials are used to convey speaker subjectivity, rather than source of information, and that switches between different speaker subjectivities, which may be encoded as ‘selves’ or ‘others’, are particularly ev…
Evidentials and evidential strategies in interactional and socio-cultural context
Although the grammar of evidential has revived significant descriptive, typological, and theoretical attention to since the 1980s (see surveys in Aikhenvald 2004 and Speas 2008), attention to this grammatical and functional category from scholars interested in the social, cultural, and interactional aspects of language has been more sporadic and less systematizing in nature ( see e.g., Agha 2002, Atkinson 1999, Chafe 1986, Clift 2003, Fox 2001, H…
Ok: The improbable story of America’s greatest word
There are a number of good reasons for reading OK.Anyone with only a passing interest in language will be engaged by this witty, enjoyable account of the origins of OK, as well as the competing theories about its beginnings.Allan Metcalf has devoted serious attention to the archival evidence for its improbable origins as a joking, deliberately-misspelled abbreviation for the phrase 'all correct', rendered as 'oll korrect', which first entered the…
Ideophones’ challenges for typological linguistics: The case of Pastaza Quichua
Typological studies of motion verbs have struggled to conceptualize a framework that would adequately account for languages which make use of ideophoness for expressing manner of motion. This paper examines ideophones in the Pastaza Quichua dialect of Amazonian Ecuador, with a special focus on the structural patterns observable in two categories of Quichua verbs of motion: verbs of motion by limited translocation and verbs of motion by nonlimited…
Earthy Concreteness and Anti-Hypotheticalism in Amazonian Quichua Discourse
This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please
The Systematic Stretching and Contracting of Ideophonic Phonology in Pastaza Quichua
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 …
Lexicography in-your-face: The active semantics of Pastaza Quichua ideophones
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…
Examination of Manner of Motion Sound Symbolism for English Nonce Verbs
This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to…
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia are words that exhibit sound symbolism by imitating a range of sensory perceptions, including sounds, movements, and images. Within the English‐speaking world the term “onomatopoeia” has undergone fluctuations in its valorization over time, which have had an effect on current research today. It enjoyed a prestigious rhetorical status during the Renaissance and was part of early pedagogical texts' representations of language, the sens…
How do you even know what ideophones mean?”: Gestures’ contributions to ideophone semantics in Quichua
Using data from the Northern Pastaza (qvc) and Upper Napo Quichua (quw) dialects of Amazonian Ecuador, this paper argues that the semantics of ideophones, a highly marked form class of expressive words, is principled and describable with a combination of sensori-semantic features and a fine-grained typology of gestures, based on insights from Streeck (2008) and others. Specifically, ideophones’ sensori-semantics are broken down into a semantic ma…
The Mindful Animism of Ideophony in Pastaza and Upper Napo Kichwa
This paper proposes a novel perspective for thinking about ideophones, which are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions and emotions with linguistic sounds and with so-called "paralinguistic" features, especially gesture and intonation. By considering their performative and depictive qualities with concepts from mindfulness and meditative practices, it is argued that a contemplative, mindful impulse underlies their use by Kichwa-spe…
Neurological evidence for the context-independent multisensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: An fNirs study in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categoriz…
Linguistics (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Psychology (12 works) · History (9 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Categorization, perception, and language (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (6 works) · Communication (5 works)