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Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 17:2 (2022) ► pp.300–324

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Structural markedness and depiction

The case of lower sequential predictability in cantonese ideophones

 | University of Hong Kong
 | University of Pennsylvania
 | Georgetown University
 | University of Hong Kong
Published online: 29 November 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.21016.tho
Abstract
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally marked, i.e., exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper, “marked” is broadly used to mean phonologically marked ( (2021). Ideophones (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes). PsyArXiv. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: Akita, K. & Dingemanse, M. (2019). Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives). In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics (ed. Mark Aronoff). Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Using Cantonese ideophones as our case study, this paper measures sequential predictability within ideophones and non-ideophones, as a way to test their relative degree of structural markedness. We created a database of non-ideophones and ideophones from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCC) (Luke, K. K., & Wong, M. L. Y. (2015). The Hong Kong Cantonese corpus: Design and uses. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, 251, 312–333.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and Mok, W. E. (2001). Chinese sound symbolism: A phonological perspective [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Hawaii. and calculated the sequential predictability of each phoneme in various phonological contexts. The results indicate that Cantonese ideophones exhibit lower degrees of sequential predictability than non-ideophones, lending empirical support to the structural markedness of ideophones. We argue that non-ideophones exhibit a higher degree of sequential predictability because they follow the phonotactic regularities of Cantonese, whereas ideophones, to some degree, flout these regulations in favor of sequences of sounds that might better depict a given referent or percept.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Data
  • Analysis
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
References (78)
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