Deccan College Bicentenary Monograph Series: 16
About the Book
This monograph describes a series of exploratory studies undertaken to establish the nature and extent of iconicity (defined as motivated form-meaning resemblances) associated with a group of Telugu ideophones and reduplicated words that appeared in a wide variety of Telugu texts. It contains a detailed discussion of major theoretical concepts relating to iconicity, a comprehensive review of previous research on iconicity as well as some reflections on methodologies. After listing some of the iconic vocabularies in select Indian languages, a set of empirical studies are described that provide valuable information pertaining to the nature and degree of imagistic, diagrammatic, and metaphoric iconicity in Telugu. Based on the results of these studies, tentative implicational hierarchies and gradations in iconicity for Telugu ideophones and reduplicated words are proposed. This research raises several new questions that need to be addressed in future research besides underscoring the need to reconceptualize the nascent discipline of 'language studies' in India.
About the Author
Duggirala Vasanta obtained her doctoral degree in Audiology from the University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA in the year 1986. From 1987-2015, she was on the teaching faculty of the department of Linguistics, Osmania University, Hyderabad. During 2015-2017, she has worked on a project titled, Language and Experience: A typology of Telugu ideophones funded by the University Grants Commission under their Emeritus Fellow scheme. Her research interests and publications deal with different aspects of Applied Linguistics, Education, Gender studies and Translation.
Preface
Iconicity defined as a motivated, resemblance relationship between linguistic forms and their meanings was once thought to be a marginal phenomenon confined to limited number of onomatopoeic forms in the lexicons of most languages. However, in recent years, iconicity is viewed as a more general property of the lexicon, one that operates along with arbitrariness in shaping language in all its modalities. Many non-Indo-European languages in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, some indigenous languages of South America, and Balto-Finnic languages reportedly exhibit a substantial amount of iconicity in specialized vocabulary such as ideophones and reduplicated words. Ideophones are words that evoke an idea in sound and in other sensory perceptions including movement, color, shape, action, and even emotions. In many African and Asian languages, they constitute an independent lexical class. Ideophones are creative renditions that are highly context dependent. They are multimodal performances inviting listeners to imagine what it is like to perceive the depicted scene. Reduplication figures quite prominently in many ideophones. Some non-ideophonic reduplicated words (full, partial, echo-words) abundantly present in the languages of South Asia are also considered iconic by the quantity principle of iconicity according to which more of the same form stands for more of the content. While most reduplicated words have a simplex form that is meaningful, ideophones do not have simplex forms. Samarin (1971), known for his extensive work on African ideophones opined that since ideophones contribute to our understanding of a culture, we should take them as seriously as nouns and verbs. Yet, ideophones do not find a place in dictionaries. They have also been ignored in grammatical descriptions of most languages, and in mainstream theoretical linguistic discussions throughout the 20th century. Dingemanse (2023) argued that ideophones in most languages constitute a distinct word-class. Specifically, he points out that in Mundari, an Afro-asiatic language spoken in India, a dictionary exists with over 1500 ideophones (the preferred term is, 'expressives' in South Asia). In Mundari, the ideophones have reduplicative forms and very detailed semantics. Further, in this language, the lexical items are fluid in that they can function as nouns or verbs or adjectives in different contexts. Yet, they have not figured in any word-class debates or grammatical descriptions of Mundari. After pointing out this fact, Dingemanse aptly states that if discussions on 'typology' started from the point of view of Austroasiatic or Bantu languages, it is likely that ideophones would have been recognized as one of the major word-classes. He adds further that a model of grammar that devotes considerable space to comparatives, superlatives than to ideophones and interjections certainly perpetuates a peculiar view of language structure.
Introduction
1.0. Background Iconicity in language at a very general level deals with the relationship between meaning and reference, one of the much-debated topics among philosophers, linguists, culture theorists, and cognitive scientists for a very long time. Researchers belonging to these disciplines sought answers to questions such as: Do objects, people, and events in the world carry their own fixed mentally stored meanings that language merely reflects? do meanings shift as we use language in specific situations while communicating with others who share our culture? Is perception a matter of encountering concrete external things, places, and people? or does it deal with establishing qualitative relations among things, spaces, and perceiving agents? How does our experience with the sensory world influence our thinking, speaking, writing, and signing? Well-known culture theorist, Stuart Hall opined that culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and "making sense" of the world in broadly similar ways. For this reason, he argued, we must view language as a shared cultural space in which production of meanings takes place with both speakers and listeners participating in meaning making process termed, 'semiosis'. Within the pragmatist school of philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce's work on semiotic systems demonstrated that language using involves a variety of semiotic resources such as icons, indices, and symbols simultaneously. Specifically, Peirce commented that while symbol is mentally associated with the object; index identifies its object; icon "shows" us the object or enacts it before our eyes. Within the discipline of mainstream linguistics, through most part of the of 20th century till date, the dominant belief was that language and reality are totally independent of each other, and that whatever relationship exists between linguistic symbols and meanings associated with them ought to be completely arbitrary. The argument underlying this belief was that no language can be used if it is not arbitrarily structured. Both the structuralist theories of Ferdinand Saussure and the subsequent generative theories of Noam Chomsky adhered to the arbitrariness thesis so much so that their theoretical formulations involving strictly symbol-based concepts became axioms and dogmas in all branches of linguistics, both theoretical and applied in India and elsewhere. By late 80's and early 90's, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) emerged as a sub-discipline (see Evans and Green 2006, and Panther, Thornburg, and Barcelona 2009 for elaboration of how CL of the 90's with capital letters is different from the cognitive linguistics of the 60's and 70's). Linguists belonging to CL began to realize the crippling effects of viewing language as something that is constituted only by arbitrary combination of symbolic categories and rules.
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