The syntax of Amharic ideophones

Teferi Mulugeta; Bye Yimam

doi:10.21744/mami.v3n1/2.28

Authors

Teferi Mulugeta
Teferi2023@gmail.com
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
Bye Yimam Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Keywords:

complex predicate, distributional restrictions, ideophones, syntax, syntactic function

Abstract

This study is on Amharic ideophones, a subject that has not been described well in the syntax of Amharic. The data used for the analysis are collected from natural settings of the Amharic-speaking community in Debre Birhan College of Teacher Education. The description shows that Amharic ideophones contradict some earlier generalizations made about the syntax of ideophones in such works which claim that ideophones do not fit in the grammar of other word classes in a language, and which states that ideophones do not enter any phrase structure, nor are they modified by other word classes. The description here shows that ideophones fit well into the grammar of the Amharic language. In contrast to such claims, they project different phrases such as noun phrases, which occur in subject and object positions and they can occur with or without a modifier. Their verb phrases appear with adverbial modifiers. Amharic ideophones can also be modifiers of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They form complex predicates with auxiliaries. Their noun phrases come in dative, ablative and locative case forms. Ideophones occur in all types of sentences, suggesting that their distribution is unrestricted.

References

Akita, K., & Dingemanse, M. (2019). Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives). In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics (pp. 1–17). Oxford University Press.

Amberber, M., Baker, B., & Harvey, M. (Eds.). (2010). Complex predicates: Cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure. Cambridge University Press.

Arnaiz, C. B. (2019). The Role of Ideophones: Phonological and Morphological Characteristics in Literature. International Journal of Cognitive and Language Sciences, 13(4), 488-491.

Arunachalam, S., & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition, 114(3), 442-446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.015

Bodomo, A. (2006). The structure of ideophones in African and Asian languages: The case of Dagaare and Cantonese. In Selected proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African languages and linguistics in broad perspectives (pp. 203-213). Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Tanaka, M. (2008). Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production. Lingua, 118(2), 172-189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.003

Butt, M. (2010). The light verb jungle: Still hacking away. Complex predicates in cross-linguistic perspective, 48-78.

Central Statistical Agency. (2008). Population Census Commission of Ethiopia. Summary and Statistical Report of the 2007 Population and Housing Census: Population Size by Age and Sex. Addis Ababa.

Childs, G. T. (1994). African ideophones. Sound symbolism, 178, 204.

Cinque, G. (2004). Issues in adverbial syntax. Lingua, 114(6), 683-710. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00048-2

Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross‐linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics compass, 6(10), 654-672.

Dixon, R. M. W. (2010a). Basic Linguistic Theory 1 (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. (2012). Basic Linguistic Theory 3 (First, Vol. 3). Oxford University Press.

Franck, G. E. (2014). Ideophones in Manyika Shona: A descriptive analysis of ideophones and their function in Manyika (Bantu).

Hernandez, A. E., Hofmann, J., & Kotz, S. A. (2007). Age of acquisition modulates neural activity for both regular and irregular syntactic functions. NeuroImage, 36(3), 912-923. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.02.055

Jekale, D. A. (2017). Gemination in Amharic: Examination of the Duration of Amharic Consonants. Ethiopian Journal of Languages and Literature, 13, 65-84.

Kuroda, S. Y. (2003). Complex predicates and predicate raising. Lingua, 113(4-6), 447-480. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(02)00082-7

Kwon, N., & Yu, S. (2018). Experimental evidence for the productivity of total reduplication in Japanese ideophones and ordinary vocabulary. Language Sciences, 66, 166-182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2017.09.005

Leyew, Z. (2011). Onomatopoetic-Ideophones in Ethiopian Languages, with Particular Reference to Amharic. Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 44, 1-46.

Lu, X., Casal, J. E., & Liu, Y. (2020). The rhetorical functions of syntactically complex sentences in social science research article introductions. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 44, 100832. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.100832

Moses, A. O. (2015). Contrastive Linguistics: An Exploration of Ideophones in Yoruba and Edo Speech Communities. International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education (IJHSSE), 170–181.

Ogawa, Y. (2022). The V-Neg-V complex predicates, two types of negation, and grammaticalization in Japanese. Lingua, 280, 103399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2022.103399

Pustejovsky, J. (1991). The syntax of event structure. cognition, 41(1-3), 47-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90032-Y

Reeder, P. A., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (2017). Distributional learning of subcategories in an artificial grammar: Category generalization and subcategory restrictions. Journal of memory and language, 97, 17-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2017.07.006

Rice, K. (2010). Activity incorporates in some Athabaskan languages. Complex predicates: cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure, 135-166.

Shimelis, M. (2014). Nominalization via Verbal Derivation Amharic, Tigrinya and Oromo (A Contrastive Study) [Unpublished PhD Dissertation]. Addis Ababa University.

Wetter, A. (2003). Ideophones in Amharic. Actesdu 3- Congrès Mondill de Linguistique Africaine, Lomé 2000 Kézié K. Lébikaza, 257–267.

Zelalem, L. (2011). JES. Onomatopoeic-Ideophones in Ethiopian Languages with Particular Reference to Amharic, XLU, 1–46.