Ideophones’ challenges for typological linguistics

Abstract

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 translocation. These two types of verbs and their ideophones manifest 5 major patterns of verb/ideophone interaction, which may be schematized with a gradient scale of possibilities. On the one hand, verbs and their ideophones may come together and coalesce into a unity of meaning, a meaning that is, in fact, lexicalized in one verb form by other languages. On the other hand, verbs and their ideophones may be more inclined toward a ‘separatist semantics’, in which each entity expresses a conceptually distinctive action, event, or process. These patterns problematize several assumptions made in typological studies.