Open AccessOn the Syntactic Status of Edo Ideophones
Author(s) -
Edosa James Edionhon
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
macrolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2473-6376
pISSN - 1934-5755
DOI - 10.26478/ja2020.8.13.3
Subject(s) - linguistics , onomatopoeia , feature (linguistics) , class (philosophy) , verb , perception , computer science , semantic property , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , neuroscience
Ideophones are a particular lexical class of expressive words depicting perceptual events or states, and are said to be a universal or near-universal feature of language (Dingemanse, 2012:655; Kilian-Hatz, 2001:163). This paper presents an overview of Ẹdo ideophones to characterize them in terms of their occurrence in grammatical syntactic frames. It investigates what sets them apart within word classes in Ẹdo and how they differ from their non-ideophonic counterparts in sentential constructions. The Basic Linguistic Theory was adopted as the method for data analysis. This was done to show how ideophones manifest syntactically in the language. Ideophones appear in copular frames with some verbs in the language, especially the verb ‘to be’. This paper concludes that Ẹdo ideophones do not occur pre-nominally in the language.