Movement as meaning : an articulatory investigation into the iconicity of ideophones

Abstract

When a person gestures with their hands, it is usually the movement of their hands that makes those actions meaningful. Movement can be used to show size and shape among many other percepts. Hands aside, a variety of movements are also happen in our mouths when we pronounce words. This thesis looks at whether movement of the tongue, lips, and air expelled from the mouth and through the nose can be as meaningful as hand movement is for gestures and sign languages. Of course, many words cannot be understood in this way. For example, the movements involved in pronouncing dog or insurance have nothing to do with the meanings of these words. But what about words like wham or higgledy-piggledy? These words are ideophones, and like hand gestures, they are supposed to imitate what they mean. First, we break down consonants from ideophones into properties of movement. Second, we see if these movements correlate with different meanings across 13 languages. We find that some movements do consistently associate with meanings across multiple, unrelated languages. This shows that movement can be a viable way for native and non-native speakers to interpret what ideophones mean. Next, we show that movements are subject to a simplicity bias across 17 languages. The fewer the movements in a consonant, the more ideophones that will contain this consonant. We also show that synonymous ideophones tend to share the same properties of movement. This means that certain movements are specific to certain kinds of meaning. This allows us to hypothesize that consonants involving more movement also carry more information (in the form of movement). Finally, this thesis zooms out to take in the bigger picture. Because they are so expressive, ideophones in natural conversation are said when speakers are also gesturing or making (strange) facial expressions. So far, it is not clear how much native speakers rely on these extra cues to understand ideophones. Results from our experiment show that ideophones, compared to other forms of imitation in spoken language, can be understood very well without these extra cues. Overall, this thesis paves the way for understanding speech as meaningful through its movement. Although ideophones from unrelated languages may look or sound very different, e.g., English woof-woof / Cantonese wōu-wōu 㕵㕵 / Russian gav-gav, they share aspects of movement which speak to a universal human understanding of what makes an imitation a ‘good’ imitation.