Language and Mimesis

An Approach to Ideophones in Amazonian Languages from Computational, Historical, Areal, and Cognitive Perspectives: The Amazon is one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. With over 300 languages classified into approximately 50 genetic units (many of which correspond to linguistic isolates, i.e., genetic units composed of a single language), the linguistic diversity of the Amazon is ten times greater than that of Eurasia or Africa and is only comparable to the linguistic diversity of Papua New Guinea. According to general typological descriptions of Amazonian languages, the presence of ideophones, words with iconic characteristics based on sound symbolism, is a highly significant areal feature in the region. Although various descriptions of this lexical class exist in different languages of the region, a large-scale comparative study has not been undertaken to date. Given this scenario, this project offers the first comparative study of ideophones in Amazonian languages, based on an ambitious database called IdeoBank and the use of computational technologies. We seek to not only contribute to the knowledge about Amazonian languages but also to address fundamental questions for linguistic theory, such as: (i) are there general trends regarding the concepts (or semantic fields) that are lexicalized through ideophones in Amazonian languages?; and (2) do we find sound-symbolic correspondences that extend across languages belonging to different families, suggesting possible areal or (quasi-)universal paths? Funded by PUCP. Research Areas: Computational Linguistics, Databases, and Language Technologies; Linguistic Revitalization, Description, and Documentation of Endangered Languages.