Keywords

sensory clustering, ideophones, Quechua

Abstract

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 generalizations.

Original Publication Citation

“Sense relations and sensory clustering in Pastaza Quichua ideophones” Paper presented for the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of America meetings, Linguistic Society of America, Salt Lake City, January 6, 2018.