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Article published In: Ideophones: Between Grammar and Poetry
Edited by Katherine Lahti, Rusty Barrett and Anthony K. Webster
[Pragmatics and Society 5:3] 2014
► pp. 431–444

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Rex Lee Jim’s ‘Mouse that Sucked’

On iconicity, interwoven-ness, and ideophones

 | University of Texas at Austin
Published online: 14 November 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.5.3.07web
This article explores the ways that Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim uses ideophony in one of his poems. I argue that Jim’s use of an ideophone in its myriad forms (from nominalized noun to independent ideophone to verb stem) creates an interwoven-ness across lines that evokes an iconicity of sound and sense. I begin by describing something of the grammatical structuring and uses of Navajo ideophony. I then turn to a discussion of contemporary written Navajo poetry that uses ideophony and especially Jim’s poetry. I follow this with a discussion of the use of Navajo ideophony in literacy education and in competing views about the appropriateness of using ideophony in Navajo written literature.
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Dingemanse, Mark
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Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide
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Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide
2019. Towards a semantic typological classification of motion ideophones. In Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives [Iconicity in Language and Literature, 16], ► pp. 137 ff. DOI logo
Nuckolls, Janis B., Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice & Sarah Hatton
2017. Lexicography in-your-face: The active semantics of Pastaza Quichua ideophones. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62:2 ► pp. 154 ff. DOI logo
Webster, Anthony K.
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