Introduction [Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area]

The complex semantic structure of expressives, as well as the wide conceptual and sensational space that they occupy, make them complex categories that have been ignored both by Western and Asian linguists because they are aprototypical grammatical features and not fitting the writing of traditional grammars. This is because of our obsession with restricting to the prototypical categorization lists approach of Aristotelian categories. We must admit that categories may encode one or more schematic meanings across different conceptual-semantic domains (Kuteva 2009, 2010). Categories can be structurally definable as well as semantically complex, and can occupy the major grammatical structure of a language without being a typical noun, adverb, adjective or verb. Unfortunately, these are considered perfunctorily in any grammar if we are lucky enough to find their mention. More often than not, expressives are unsung heroes of any grammar of South Asian languages. The form-meaning pairing that I review here presents a challenge exactly because of its complex semantics. I draw examples from the languages of the Indo-Aryan family, Austroasiatic family including the Munda group, the Davidian language family and especially from the languages of the Himalayan region, namely, Tai-Kadai, and Tibeto-Burman. The term "expressives" as used in this paper is inclusive of ideophones, onomatopoeics, mimics, imitatives and sound symbolic forms. 1 Although many writers today use, the term expressive, there has been something of a naming frenzy in the past. In earlier works, especially on African and South Asian languages, expressives have also been given labels such as 'interjections,' 'descriptive adverbs,' 'picture words,' 'adverbials,' 'intensives,' 'emphatics' and 'impressifs'. Again, different scholars give different definitions of expressives. According to Childs (1989: 1), the term 'expressives' seems to have been first coined by Durand (1961) in his analysis of Vietnamese. The term was later adopted and defined by Gerald Diffloth (1972, 1976) and Murray B. Emeneau (1978). The term 'ideophone' is widely used, however, for the African phenomenon, as in Doke (1935) for Bantu. He seems to have first suggested the term, he defined or at least described an ideophone as a vivid representation of an idea of sound, a word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to

Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia, 2020

Hitherto ignored area in Morphology is Expressives in South Asian languages because of their complexities and not being able to fit in the traditional pattern of grammar This paper exposes how semantically complex are expressives in the languages of South Asia.

Indian Linguistics, 2021

In this paper we reflect upon the process of producing a dictionary of expressives in Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, in eastern India, by approximately 1,530,000 people. We explore some methodological challenges faced in the study of expressives, as well as approaches taken in this long-term study of Mundari, including elicitation, discussion, performance, text analysis and participant observation. The study of expressives is gaining momentum in the region, yet efforts to create dictionaries of this important class of words are still few. We argue that field-based, multidisciplinary studies that draw on the insights of native speakers on the use of expressives in society are critical in this endeavour. This is crucial because semantically, there is a great, inherent tension between the desire to capture the depth of an expressive's complex meaning and the necessity of managing an inevitable process of standardization. The challenges and risks of 'taming' of expressive meaning require solid ethnographic grounding. Dictionaries of expressives will thus resemble encyclopedias in that they present a linguistic cosmology, with all the social relationships, ecological entanglements, moral statements and ethnic representations they embody.

The term “expressives” refers to sound symbolism which is in itself not a very satisfactory term because it provides a radically confused concept of 'symbol'. “Symbol” is an extensively used in many different disciplines, but it lacks clarity. However, it covers a phenomenon which has been noted and studied over very many years despite the fact that many linguists believe that the phenomenon does not exist at all. Saussure (1915) is famous for the expression 'l'arbitraire du signe', by which he denied onomatopoeia and considers all other natural expressiveness of words as marginal. He treated even apparent onomatopoeic words as no more than conventionalised forms. This view was restated and reinforced by Charles Hockett(1958, 1963) in his influential identification of what he described as 'design features' of language: He thought that the relation between a meaningful element in language and its denotation is independent of any physical and geometrical resemblance between the two. The semantic relation is arbitrary rather than iconic. Firth(1964) also warned against the concept of sound symbolism, by saying that the sounds of words in themselves paint at nothing.

1987

This investigation of cross-linguistic patterns in lexicon-grammar interaction looks at complex predicate data from four Asian languages (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, Marathi). In these languages verbs whose basic meanings are HIT and EAT are used as operators in complex predicates: eg, Mandarin dǎ yìge quántóu {HIT a fist} 'give a punch' versus chī yìge quántóu {EAT a fist} 'take a punch' or Hindi-Urdu raub mār-{awe HIT} 'intimidate' versus raub khā-{awe EAT} 'be intimidated'. We show that in Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi the normal antonymy of paired CPs featuring these two operators disappears if the CPs themselves alternate with the monolexical heads of intransitive clauses provided those clauses are unaccusative. END ABSTRACT.

The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia, 2018

We are very grateful to Christina van der Wal Anonby, Erik Anonby, René Lacroix and Ludwig Paul for comments and corrections on an earlier version of this introduction. We of course bear the responsibility for the remaining shortcomings.

Iranian Studies, 2020

European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 2012

Non-Prototypical Reduplication Edited by Aina Urdze, 2018

The paper discusses in detail echo formations and expressives found in South Asian languages. Their structural features and their associated semantics across a wide range of languages indicate that these two are significant South Asian areal phenomena (Emeneau 1956, 1969). The complex semantic structure of these constructions as well as a wide semantic and conceptual space they occupy-make them complex categories which had been ignored both by western and Asian linguists because they are a-prototypical grammatical feature not fitting the traditional grammar writing. Considering the effects of globalization, it is observed that while echo formations are stable structures which are indicators of social cohesion and bonding and thus find their inroads into ever-evolving languages, expressives are endangered structures and are dying very fast.

The Aesthetics of Grammar

Many languages of the world have a lexical category referred to as expressives (Fudge 1970), phonoaesthetics (Henderson 1965 1) or ideophones to refer to noise, animal cries, mental states, physical states, and actions. Expressives may be divided in sub-categories. For instance Antilla (1977) distinguished three classes of words: 'onomatopoetic' for words describing animal cries and noise, 'descriptive' for those referring to physical states and actions, and 'affective' for mental states words; whereas Diffloth (1972, 1976 2 , 2001) defines ideophones and onomatopoetic as sub-classes of 'expressives'. Expressive is sometimes considered as a distinguished part-of-speech category. Most recently, Potts et. al (2009) have discussed expressives as a class of emotive morphemes, words, and constructions. However they are labelled, expressive words have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with structural and phonological peculiarities, although these are not sufficient conditions for defining this category cross-linguistically. For instance, Henderson (1965: 460) evokes secondary phonological pattern of 'affective' language whereas Mithun (1982) 3 notices that expressives are "particularly resistant to regular phonetic change." As for the syntactic patterns exhibited by expressives, Clark (1996: 535) and Goddard (2008: 89) point out the non-standard or reverse order of components in expressive compounds. Jaisser (1990: 160) reports on syntactic device for differentiating the locus of