Iconicity of Telugu Ideophones and Full Word Reduplications

Iconicity of Telugu Ideophones and Full Word Reduplications

Vasanta Duggirala, Osmania University, India

Lalita Murty, University of York, UK

This paper reports results of analysis based on morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of

ideophones, and Full Word Reduplications (FWRs) occurring in 710 written constructions in

Telugu. It was observed that most of the adverbial ideophones with high semantic specificity, less

grammatical integration, and expressing semantic function of intensification manifest higher levels

of iconicity compared to FWRs. Some of the FWRs involving nouns, adjectives and derived

adverbs whilst expressing the semantic function of augmentation, manifest moderate to low levels

of iconicity because they also encode context-bound meanings of attenuation and approximation.

Drawing on the observation that ideophones and FWRs complement each other in expressing

properties of events, attributes and objects, a tentative scale of iconicity is proposed for Telugu

with a suggestion that it should be validated through future research by making use of spoken and

written corpora of constructions containing ideophones, full and partial word reduplications as

well as echo-words.

Key words: Full Word Reduplication, Iconicity, Ideophones, Semantic functions, Telugu

1.0 Introduction

Iconicity defined as a relationship of resemblance or similarity between linguistic forms and their

meanings has a larger presence than being confined to limited number of onomatopoeic words

expressing imagistic iconicity. Ideophones denoting non-auditory eventualities connected to

vision, movement, inner-bodily feelings emotions (interoception) and other cognitive states are

semantically specific and have been shown to manifest both imagistic and diagrammatic iconicity

(e.g. Beck, 2008; Dingemanse 2012). Cross-linguistic surveys on reduplicated expressions across

languages of the world revealed that by encoding meanings of plurality, collectivity,

intensification, diminution, attenuation etc., reduplications also manifest some degree of iconicity

(e.g. Dingemanse 2015; Kouwenberg and LaCharite 2015; Mattes 2014). In the past, researchers

have suggested that both imagistic and diagrammatic (relational) iconicity play a role in word

formation processes. For example, Waugh (1994:66) stated that many word affinity relations in

English exhibit different degrees of relational iconicity, and that all of them constantly maintain a

delicate and dynamic balancing act that produces a continuum of iconicity and non-iconicity. She

felt that lexical polysemy could contribute to impoverishment of iconicity in some cases. Fischer

(1999: 348) commented that creative (iconic/depictive) and symbolic (descriptive) modes of

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signification always co-exist in everyday language even as processes of grammaticalization

(involving metaphor or metonymy) work to regulate communication. The idea that Iconicity co-

exists with arbitrariness and systematicity in every language has received empirical support in a

more recent investigation (Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen and Monaghan 2015).

Currently, consensus seems to center around the notion that iconicity is indeed a graded

phenomenon involving many lexical classes and hence efforts should be made to operationalize

iconicity empirically for individual languages. In this chapter, we describe one such effort in

relation to Telugu.

Telugu is one of four major literary languages belonging to the Dravidian family primarily spoken

in the two Telugu-speaking states of Andhra Pradesh (A.P.) and Telangana. Telugu has

agglutinative morphology. It’s canonical word order is SOV, although other orders are permitted

in creative writing, and newspaper reportage. Ideophones are abundant in spoken and written

Telugu, both classical and modern. All word classes in Telugu can be reduplicated for conveying

semantic functions of continuity, distributivity, intensification, affection or even pejoration (see

Krishnamurti and Gwynn 1985; Abbi, 1992; Sailaja 2015 for Telugu examples). However,

published works relating to ideophones are limited to one or two dictionaries or compilations (e.g.

Bhaskararao 1977; Usha Devi 2001). There are no on-line corpora of either ideophones or

reduplicated expressions in Telugu. It is against this context, we report this exploratory study based

on morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis of Telugu ideophones and FWRs in 710 constructions

from a Personally Collected Corpus (PCC)1 of printed Telugu texts. This study seeks answers to

two specific questions: (1) Are ideophones more iconic than Full Word Reduplications? (2) Does

iconicity gets distributed across different lexical categories (other than ideophones) in creative

writing? The rest of this chapter is structured along the following main headings: Review of

previous research on iconicity and reduplication (2.0); Iconicity of Telugu ideophones (3.0);

Iconicity of Telugu FWRs (4.0); Summary and Conclusion (5.0).

2.0 Review of select research

Gasser, Sethuraman and Hockeman (2005) have offered operational definitions for the concepts:

absolute iconicity (e.g. onomatopoeia), relative iconicity (form similarity relations positively

correlate with meaning similarity relations as happens in most expressives or ideophones),

arbitrariness (absence of relative iconicity), and anti-iconicity (negative correlation between form

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similarity and meaning similarity as with most concrete nouns). They proposed a metric termed,

Iconicity Quotient (IC) that takes into consideration phonetic and semantic similarity in the

linguistic forms and their corresponding similarity / dissimilarity in meanings. They applied this

metric to a set of ideophones and concrete nouns extracted from Japanese and Tamil dictionaries

and concluded that in both these languages, ideophones are more iconic than concrete nouns.

Subsequent research briefly reviewed below has highlighted the fact that the interpretation of

meanings of ideophones is context-specific or even construction-specific.

Akita’s (2009) exhaustive treatment of Japanese mimetics resulted in a three-way typology:

• PHONOMIMES including onomatopoeia, and other sound-based expressive elements,

• PHENOMIMES denoting physical action / movement and /or vision based ones, and

• PSYCHOMIMES denoting internal bodily experiences or mental states.

Akita presented extensive empirical support for what he termed, the Lexical Iconicity Hierarchy

(LIH) that posits onomatopoeic words as super-expressives lying on the most iconic end of the

hierarchy, and non-mimetic words on the least iconic side shown below:

Super-expressives > Phonomimes > Phenomimes > Psychomimes > Non-mimetics

Super expressives and phonomimes were considered as highly iconic because sound directly

motivates sound unlike in phenomimes and psychomimes that depend on more than one modality

or encode more abstract psychological and emotional experiences connected to non-auditory

eventualities. Akita also claimed that the highly iconic auditory mimetics tend to belong to

adverbial class while poorly iconic mimetics representing internal bodily feelings tend to be

realized as verbs, adjectives and nouns. Further, abstract concepts that visuo-psych mimetics

encode are often metaphorically or metonymically understood through more concrete physical

experiences that are linked to them. In a detailed discussion of the role of constructions in

determining iconicity (or expressivity) of Japanese mimetic verbs, Akita and Tsujimura (2016: 47)

stated that the creative aspect of mimetic verbs results from a combination of imagery that mimetic

roots induce and the argument structure types in which a given mimetic appears. Further, the most

iconic phonomimes are adverbs and cannot become independent verbs, whereas about half of the

phenomimes and psychomimes in their corpus functioned as verbs. More recently, Dingemanse

and Akita (2017) argued that greater expressiveness goes with less grammatical integration and

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vice versa in Japanese as well as ten other languages spoken in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, North

and South Americas. They offered evidence for the expressivity of Japanese ideophones using

‘predicate integration hierarchy’:

Quotative < collocational < predicate verbal / nominal

While defending this hierarchy, Dingemanse and Akita (2017:14) pointed out that (1) quotative

ideophones occur in preverbal position; they are syntactically and semantically separated from their

host predicates. They are most expressive since they are not syntactically obligatory. (2) In

collocational constructions, adverbial ideophones which appear in close association with verbs

without quotative markers in different sentential positions, form a tight unit with their host

predicates and therefore are more morpho-syntactically integrated than quotative ideophones, and

(3) the two types of predicative constructions are tightly integrated with the syntax of the sentence,

being syntactically obligatory, they are considered the least expressive. According to their

‘syntactic optionality’ criterion, predicative verbal or nominal ideophones are more obligatory

(therefore less iconic) compared to quotatives and collational ideophones (see Akita 2017 for more

details about typological implications of these findings).

Turning to published research on the topic of reduplication relevant to present discussion,

reduplication has long been considered as a means of word formation that manifests some measure

of iconicity, i.e., forms and meanings resemble each other in a quantitative respect. Kajitani (2005)

analyzed expressions containing reduplications from 16 genetically and geographically distributed

languages for their semantic properties. The results suggested that some aspects of universal

semantic properties of reduplication do indeed reflect iconicity and common perceptual

experiences of speakers across all 16 languages. He proposed a hierarchy of meaning properties

for reduplicated expressions:

Augmentation Intensification [Attenuation Diminution]

Referring to the bold arrows in this implicational hierarchy, Kajitani (2005:94) stated that

Augmentation (AUG.) defined as increase in quantity of objects, participants, events is preferred

over Intensification (INT.) or increase in quality or degree of an action/feeling etc. in all the

languages investigated. If Intensification is expressed by means of reduplication, then

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Augmentation can also be expressed via reduplication. Similarly, in all languages, if Diminution

(DIM.) or decrease of quantity is expressed by means of reduplication, then attenuation (ATT.) or

decrease of quality or degree can also be expressed through reduplication. The light arrow in the

middle indicates (language-specific) statistical preference. These results suggest that cross-

linguistically, iconicity of reduplicated expressions is determined primarily by the application of

‘quantity principle’ that holds, ‘more of the same form motivates more of the same content’.

Lai (2006: 486) pointed out one of the fundamental and unresolved problems relating to iconicity

of reduplicated forms: how can reduplication be associated with both intensification and

diminution / attenuation? Using data from Hakka reduplications, Lai argued that reduplication

should be treated as one of the strategies speakers adopt to share their conceptualization of the

world with others in the community, and that it is not an all-or-none phenomenon, instead, it

constitutes a scale. Lai pointed out that seemingly contradictory senses of intensification vs.

diminution / attenuation in reduplicated forms can be interpreted as iconic by drawing on

contextual factors. More recently, Rozhansky (2015) proposed two semantic patterns / principles

underlying iconicity, viz., (1) Similarity principle (expression of likeness, change of lexical class,

and pejorativity), and (2) Quantity principle (expression of plurality, continuity, distributivity). He

argued that these two patterns get combined in reduplicative expressions that encode attenuation

and emphasis typically found in adjectives. He cites Telugu data in support of this point. Kallergi

(2015) presented evidence from Modern Greek that supports the need to distinguish Total

Reduplication (TR) from emphatic or pragmatic repetition in theorizing linguistic expressivity. He

stressed that TR as an expressive device has three-fold function: creating a pragmatic effect,

encoding emotive/affective meanings, and serving social function. Kouwenberg and LaCharite

(2015) discussed iconicity of reduplicated expressions in Caribbean Creole (CC) languages and

identified certain gaps and constraints that lessen the level of iconicity expressed by different

grammatical classes depending on how they denote properties of events (verbs), attributes

(adjectives) and objects (nouns). Published works on this topic in relation to languages of India

are confined mostly to description of their phono-semantics of ideophones, and morpho-syntactic,

semantic and areal-typological features of reduplications (see for e.g. Apte 1968; Abbi 1992;

Bhaskararao 1977; Sailaja, 2015; Usha Devi 2001). Recently, Duggirala (2016) reported a study

involving 50 native speakers who rated Telugu ideophones and reduplicated forms occurring

inside sentences on a 5-point scale. They gave higher ratings to auditory, vision and movement

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based ideophones and reduplications that expressed quantity changes compared to interoception

ideophones and reduplications expressing similarity relations. The differences in these ratings

were statistically significant.

3.0 Iconicity of Telugu ideophones

Of the 710 constructions analyzed in the PCC, there were 400 ideophone tokens belonging to 70

types. The ideophone tokens were classified into two major classes based on their structure and

function: In the first class, there were 90 ideophonic roots with the following syllable shapes: CVX

where X stands for a nasal /n/ or a coda final obstruent or sonorant in gemination (CVC / CVCC /

CVCVCC). The syllable structure of this class of ideophones clearly violates Telugu phonotactic

rule of not having coda-final consonants other than /m/ (either in singleton or as geminate form).

These ideophones represent natural sounds from the environment, punctual actions, feelings and

states lasting for a very brief duration. They appear inside sentences with the help of a vowel plus

an increment -ma, always followed by quotative markers, -anu or -na ‘say’ as in examples 1-3

(with ideophone type, # of tokens, source and construction # in parentheses):

(1) talupu kirru-mandi (Auditory ideophone: 35 tokens, JB stories, C #4)

door IDEO-creak.PST-AGR

The door creaked

(2) loolaakulu taɭukku-mannaayi (Vision ideo., 40 tokens, PYR stories, C # 134)

ear-rings IDEO-flash.PST-AGR

‘There is a bright flash of the earrings’

(3) naaku curruna manɖindi (Intero. Ideo., 15 tokens Dilawar stories, C # 306)

I-DAT IDEO burn.PST-AGR

‘I got angry’

These ideophones are akin to the non-reduplicated (extra-linguistic) ideophones in Marathi

discussed by Apte (1968) or the super-expressives mentioned by Akita (2009). One of the

characteristic feature of this class of ideophones is, they always appear in preverbal position

accompanied by quotative marker, ‘say’ and hence manifest highest level of iconicity.

The second class consisted of 310 tokens of CVCV ideophones. They were classified under three

groups based on concrete vs abstract nature of experiences they encode. Thus, auditory ideophones

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depict single modality-based experience of hearing, whereas Vision + Movement ideophones draw

on both vision and hearing (movement usually accompanies sound) and interoception based

ideophones are even more abstract since they represent inner bodily feelings and emotions.

Table -1 presents ten examples for each of the three categories of CVCV ideophones. There were

20 types of Auditory ideophones, 30 types of Vision + Movement ideophones, and 20 types of

Interoception or inner bodily feelings and emotions. In the last category, there were ten tokens

depicting inner bodily sensations, and ten denoting emotions.

Table-1: Examples of CVCV ideophones in Telugu

Auditory

Ideophones

Types: 20

Tokens: 65

Vision + Move-

ment ideophones

Types: 30

Tokens: 160

Interoceptive

Ideophones

Types: 20

Tokens: 85

paʈa paʈa ‘biting’ bhaga bhaga ‘burning’ gadza gadza ‘shiver’

wala wala ‘crying’ mila mila ‘shine’ guba guba ‘anxiety’

kara kara ‘chewing’ taɭa taɭa ‘shine’ dzila dzila ‘itch’

ʈaka ʈaka ‘knocking’ misa misa ‘shine’ naka naka ‘hunger’

pheɭa pheɭa ‘breaking’ boʈa boʈa ‘tears’ wila wila ‘pain’

gala gala ‘gushing water’ gora gora ‘dragging’ rusa rusa ‘anger’

ʈapa ʈapa ‘falling rain-

drops’

caka caka ‘fast walk’ taha taha

‘enthusiasm’

paka paka ‘loud laughter’ guna guna ‘slow walk’ Wela wela

‘embarrassment’

kica kica ‘birds chirping’ dzala dzala ‘falling’ cura cura

‘angry look’

gusa gusa ‘whispering’ repa repa ‘flutter’ guba guba ‘sadness’

It may be noted that vision and movement ideophones with 160 tokens have out-numbered the

auditory ideophons (N=65) and interoceptive ideophons (N=85) both in types and tokens. There

was only one smell ideophone (ghuma ghuma) and one touch ideophone (gara gara) which are

included in the second category. The CVCV ideophones in Telugu do not possess simplex forms

and the reduplicant is always a syllable, not a lexeme. Meanings of these ideophones are highly

specific to the actions /states being denoted. For example, the vision-based ideophones, mila mila;

taɭa taɭa, misa misa denote shininess associated with different objects: mila mila refers to ‘shining

stars’ which can get metaphorically extended to ‘shiny eyes’; taɭa taɭa denotes ‘shining pots and

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pans’ or ‘shiny jewels’ whereas, misa misa denotes ‘shiny skin’ associated with youthful looks.

misa misa is never used for denoting shine associated with pots and pans, jewels or stars. Since

high semantic specificity prevents an ideophone from participating as an independent predicate,

we treated those ideophones that cannot occur as independent predicates as less iconic than those

that occur in pre-verbal position and have some degree of syntactic freedom.

Bhaskararao (1977:12) stated that the following forms or sequence of forms enable CVCV

ideophones to participate in sentences:

• Vowel length

• Plural suffix, -lu followed by the verb, -aaɖu ‘do’

• Increment -ma followed by the verb -anu ‘say’

We have determined iconicity levels of 400 ideophone tokens by applying Dingemanse and

Akita’s (2017) grammatical integration criterion by first observing the category to which a given

ideophone belongs inside each construction. The results are displayed in Table -2:

Table -2: Grammatical categories of ideophone tokens

Ideophone type

Category

Auditory

Tokens: 100

Vision+Movt.

Tokens: 200

Interoception

Tokens: 100

Quot.-Adverbial 55 55% 50 25% 20 20%

Bare Adverbial 30 30% 95 47.5% 20 20%

Verbal 10 10% 50 25% 45 45%

Nominal-adjectival 05 5% 05 2.5% 15 15%

Looking at the percentage values listed in Table-2, it is evident that more than 80% of auditory

ideophones occur as quotative-adverbials and bare adverbials (in collocational constructions); over

60 % of vision + movement ideophones appear as quotative-adverbials or bare adverbials, whereas,

only 40% of interoception ideophones belong to these two categories. Since interoception

ideophones mostly belong to verbs (45%), they serve as predicates on their own depicting specific

experience of emotions or psychological states. Based on these facts, we argue that interoception

ideophones being grammatically well integrated into the syntax of the sentence are not as iconic

as the other two types. Auditory, vision + movement ideophones in Telugu are more iconic going

also by the quantity principle of iconicity, that is, together they encode semantic functions of

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Intensification (168 tokens) and Augmentation (45 tokens) compared to interoception ideophones

that encode only intensification (75 tokens), but not augmentation. Diminutivity is conveyed by

very few ideophones. The fact that higher level of iconicity associated with the first two types of

CVCV ideophones can be accounted for by quantity principle is illustrated through examples 4

and 5 below (with information about the category, source and construction number in that order):

(4) komma pheɭa pheɭamanʈuu wirigindi (Quot.-adv., Dilawar stories, C # 60)

branch IDEO-say break.PST-AGR

‘The branch broke making the sound, pheɭa pheɭa’

(5) kotta ruupaayi nooʈulaa pheɭa pheɭa-laaɖutunnaaɖu (Pred.verb., JB stories # 98)

new rupee note like IDEO-crisp.PST-AGR

‘He is looking crisp like a new rupee note’

The semantic function of augmentation manifests in different languages in terms of repetition /

iteration, frequentativity, plurality, variety, distributivity, quantification, collectivity and so on.

Auditory ideophones in Telugu typically express augmentation only with respect to repetition or

iteration of punctual action as evident in example-4 involving the ideophone, pheɭa pheɭa (sound

made when a dry branch breaks). It can be omitted without making the sentence ungrammatical.

However, when it gets extended metaphorically to the crispness of a new rupee note or to the

stiffness of the starched shirt worn by someone as in example-5, it becomes obligatory because it

is in a predicate-verbal construction. The next two examples of vision-based and interoception

based ideophones respectively express intensification meanings also manifest higher level of

iconicity going by quantity principle of increase in the quality or degree of an action (e.g. 6) or

feeling (e.g. 7):

(6) dzuʈʈu paʈʈukoni gora goraa iiɖcukoccindi (bare adv., JS stories, C # 208)

hair holding IDEO-forcefully drag.PST-AGR

‘(she) dragged her by holding her hair’

(7) bharta waipu cura curaa cuusindi (bare adv., IJB stories, C # 337)

husband towards IDEO look.PST-AGR

‘She looked at her husband with intense anger’

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In example -6, the vision/movement based bare-adverbial ideophone, gora goraa is used to express

manner of motion caused when a person is dragged forcibly. The interoceptive ideophone, cura

curaa in example- 8 depicts intense anger. Both are occurring in collocational constructions.

These ideophones are syntactically optional in that they can be omitted without making the

sentences ungrammatical (since they are functioning as bare adverbs). The results of our analysis

of Telugu ideophones with respect to syntactic optionality as a criterion for determining the level

of iconicity of ideophones can be expressed as follows:

Quotative –ani & Collocational – aa (optional) < Predicative verbal – aaDu (obligatory)

Auditory ideophones < Vision + Movement ideophones < Interoception ideophones

Overall, the results based on ideophones in Telugu offer support to the cross-linguistic

generalization reported in Dingemanse and Akita (2017) and Akita (2017). There are very few

Telugu ideophones that serve as nouns or adjectives. When ideophonic nouns (e.g. gala-gala-lu

with a plural marker) appear in sentence final position in newspaper language, their meanings

become conventionalized and hence they tend to lose their iconicity. Lessening of iconicity also

results when the ideophones are used metaphorically as headlines in newspapers (e.g. nagaram

gadza gadza ‘the city is shivering’). Interoception ideophones appeared in figurative language

involving metonymy and metaphors (20 tokens in our corpus).

4.0 Iconicity of FWRs in Telugu

There are at least four types of reduplicated expressions in Telugu: (1) Total Reduplication

(complete copy of the base form nela ‘month’ in reduplicated form in nela nela ‘every month’),

(2) Partial Word Reduplication involving a portion of the base being copied into the second lexeme

(e.g. iʈuu aʈuu- ‘this way-that way’), (3) Reduplicated Compounds (e.g. kuuraa-naaraa

‘vegetable-fibers’ to mean vegetables in general), and (4) Echo-words (illu-gillu ‘house and stuff).

Partial word reduplications and echo-words tend to occur more commonly in colloquial spoken

registers carrying evaluative-pragmatic (general) meanings (See Abbi 1992 for details). For the

purposes of this study, we have selected only Full Word Reduplications and not the other 3 types.

Researchers have suggested that to be fully iconic, the meaning of the simplex form must be

preserved completely in the reduplicated form. In Telugu, even total reduplication in some cases

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involves certain morpho-phonemic changes due to presence of affixes or sandhi. Therefore, we

have considered FWRs with three degrees of transparency between the base and the reduplicant.

(a.) FWR (W1=W2) type (128 tokens): Here the reduplicant is a complete copy of the base with

absolutely no change happening due to reduplication. For example, color adjective nalla-nalla

‘black-black’ or derived adverb, parigetti-parigetti ‘having run for a long time’.

(b.) FWR (W1-W2 + affix) type (132 tokens): here the affix can come immediately after the base

(e.g. waanalee-waanalu ‘excess rains’ with emphatic marker -ee sitting between the base and the

reduplicant) or more commonly, it occurs as a suffix following the reduplicant (e.g. weeɖi

weeɖigaa ‘very hot’ with adverbial suffix -gaa).

(c.) FWR (W1-W2 + sandhi (50 tokens): In this type, the process of reduplication alters the base

form thereby introducing some degree of opacity to it (e.g. appuɖappuɖu ‘once in a while’ in which

appuɖu ‘then’ when reduplicated loses the final vowel /u/ in the base; The expression ikkaɖikkaɖee

‘somewhere right here’ formed when ikkaɖee ‘here’ undergoes total reduplication. In this item, in

addition to sandhi process involving vowel change, an emphatic marker -ee appears as a suffix at

the end of reduplicated form).

In terms of form-classes, the 310 FWR tokens comprised of nouns (62) adjectives (69), adverbs

(36), verbal adverbs (47), and derived adverbs (82). There were only ten pronouns and four verbs

in the data. The first (a) type of FWR (W1=W2) has more verbal adverbs and adjectives; the second

type has derived adverbs and nouns and the sandhi type has more nouns and some adjectives.

We have attributed higher levels of iconicity to FWRs dealing with the semantic functions of

augmentation or intensification. FWRs with evaluative/pragmatic meanings associated with

diminution, attenuation and approximation were considered to have lower (diminished) levels of

iconicity since they combine both quantity and similarity principles for interpretation in addition

to involving peripheral meanings as argued by Rozhansky (2015).

The four major semantic functions of FWRs are indicated as number of tokens with % values in

parenthesis in Table -3. It is clear from this table that irrespective of the type of reduplication, most

FWRs in Telugu contribute to augmentation function (183 tokens out of 310). Less than 50 FWR

tokens express intensification of meanings suggesting that the first two types of FWRs in Telugu

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are iconic by Quantity principle. Diminution is expressed by limited number of FWRs (W1=W2)

types only (e.g. cinna cinna ‘small-small’ or koddi-koddi ‘little-little’ which are also used for

conveying politeness serving social rather than referential function). FWRs with affix (b-type)

and sandhi (c-type) also express attenuation function to some extent, and yet manifest somewhat

reduced iconicity as we show through the specific examples and discussion following Table -3.

Table -3: Major semantic functions of FWRs

Sem. function

FWR Type AUG. INT.

DIM.

ATT.

FWR (W1=W2)

128 76

(59.3%)

25

(19.37%)

23

(18.60)

4

(3.1%) FWR + Affix

132 81

(61.3%)

20

(15.15%)

4 (3%) 27

(20.4%) FWR with sandhi

50 26

(52.0%)

0

0 24

(48%)

The FWRs in examples 8, 9 and 10 below manifest high to moderate levels of iconicity because

they are encoding semantic functions of augmentation and intensification supported by the

quantity principle. It should be noted that in each example, the FWR is optional in that its omission

does not make the sentence ungrammatical.

FWR (W1=W2) Augmentation (plurality) – 76 tokens

(8) aa roodzu leestuunee pedda pedda keekalu weesaaɖu (JB stories, C # 433)

that day wake up-PTCP FWR big-big shouts do.PST-AGR

‘He started shouting loudly as soon as he woke up that day’

FWR (W1=W2) Augmentation (distributivity)

(9) waaɭɭu waaram waaram wastaaru (ORB stories, C # 460)

they FWR week-week come.FUT-AGR

‘They are going to come week after week’

FWR (W1=W2) Intensification – 25 tokens

(10) airhostess weeɖi weeɖi ʈii iccindi (ISD stories, C# 481)

Airhostess FWR hot-hot give-PST-AGR

‘The airhostess gave very hot tea’

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However, if the meaning of intensification is expressed through derived adverbs instead of

adjectives as in example-10, the level of iconicity is likely to get diminished due to change of

grammatical class. Same is true when the reduplication involves grammaticalized aspectual uses

or metaphors, an observation that calls for more in-depth investigation.

Turning to evaluative-pragmatic meanings associated with FWRs, we present below FWRs that

encode attenuation and approximation meanings manifesting low level of iconicity. Examples 11

& 12 contain FWRs with low level of iconicity because reduplication is contributing to

attenuation of meaning.

FWR (W1-W2) with suffix, Attenuation – 27 tokens

(11) wanʈloo cali caligaa anipincindi (IJB stories, C # 643)

body-LOC. FWR cold-cold feel.PST-AGR

‘My body felt somewhat cold’

FWR (W1-W2) with sandhi, Attenuation – 24 tokens

(12) naanna akkaɖikakkaɖee woɭɭu teliikunɖaa paɖipooyaaru (PYR storis, C# 688)

father FWR there-there unconscious fall_PST-AGR

‘Father dropped down unconscious right at that very place’

The FWRs in the above two examples are somewhat obligatory in that while deletion of

reduplicated form does not make the sentence completely ungrammatical, it calls for a secondary

interpretation of meaning. To elaborate, in example 11, reduplicated form cali cali-gaa an adverb

derived from the noun cali ‘cold’ could mean ‘very cold’ or ‘somewhat cold’ depending on the

context relating to the event being described. There are many such forms involving derived

adverbial marker -gaa that seems to reduce the quality of given property (color) or experience.

Constructions containing simplex forms (for e.g. caligaa) is not as ambiguous as the one with

reduplication. The FWR in example 12 expresses ‘exactness’ meaning that combines both

semantic and pragmatic features amenable for analysis in radial category models (e.g. Jurafsky

1996).

The fact that a majority of FWRs are encoding augmentation function as opposed to ideophones

which for the most part seem to be expressing intensification function requires some explanation.

14

This difference could be due to differences in the inherent semantic properties that promote or

curtail their application to events, attributes and objects (see Table-4):

Table – 4: Semantic properties encoded by Ideophones and FWRs

IDEOPHONE

TYPES

EVENTS

Punctual Non-

punctual

ATTRIBUTES

Gradable Non-

Gradable

OBJECTS

Count Non-

count

Auditory + + -- -- -- -- Vision + Movt. + + -- + -- + Interoception + + -- -- -- -- FWR

(W1=W2) + + + + + + FWR Affix + + + + + + FWR Sandhi + + + + + +

One striking fact evident from Table -6 is, while all three types of ideophones encode punctual and

non-punctual events, there are many gaps with respect to attributes and objects. Vision ideophone

taɭa taɭa can describe the shininess attribute of vessels; non-count object denoting vision

ideophone, kiʈa kiʈa applies to crowds encoding augmentation via increase in participants.

However, there are aspects of augmentation involving distributivity, variety etc. that ideophones

are incapable of depicting. In contrast, lexical items undergoing full word reduplication in Telugu

express a greater range of semantic properties tied to events, attributes and objects when compared

to ideophones which seem to be confined mostly to events.

It should be noted that there were as many as 183 of the 310 FWRs in our corpus expressing

augmentation relating to properties of events, attributes and objects. Among the first type of Total

reduplication, augmentation is carried out mostly by verbal adverbs and adjectives. In

reduplication with suffix category, augmentation involves derived adverbs and nouns and the third

category of reduplication with sandhi includes numeral adjectives. In the sandhi category, adverbs

of place and time express attenuative meanings. Some adverbs of place such as mundu ‘front’ have

been grammaticalized to denote future in their reduplicated form, mundu-mundu ‘near future’ or

wenaka ‘back’ in its reduplicated form, wenaka-wenakki denotes past. In these cases, the simplex

forms and the corresponding reduplicated forms convey different, and somewhat unrelated

meanings manifesting lower levels of iconicity. This is another topic that calls for more research.

15

The iconicity levels we have attributed via quantity principle is distributed across the three FWR

types such that going by number of tokens, FWR (W1=W2) with 123 tokens and FWR Affix with

105 tokens manifest relatively high iconicity in contrast to the third type, FWR -Sandhi which has

only 26 tokens. Only FWR (W1=W2) can encode events (46 tokens) of which 30 tokens express

punctual events (e.g. koʈʈi koʈʈi ‘repeated hitting’) and the rest non-punctual events (e.g. eeɖci

eeɖci ‘having cried a lot’). FWRs (W1=W2) express both gradable properties (34 tokens; e.g.

weeɖi weeɖi ‘very hot’) and non-gradable attributes (15 tokens; e.g. maɭɭi maɭɭi ‘again and again’).

The object-denoting FWRs across all three types express countability (59 tokens) thereby

expressing augmentation through plurality. These results lend support to the idea that there is a

degree of complementarity with respect to the way relational iconicity is shared by different lexical

items in Telugu. We propose that he level of iconicity is distributed among FWRs as shown in the

hierarchy (from Highest to Lowest iconicity):

FWR (W1=W2) < FWR (W1-W2) Affix < FWR (W1-W2) Sandhi

5.0. Summary and Conclusion

This chapter described an investigation undertaken to examine how iconicity gets distributed

among 400 Telugu ideophones and 310 FWRs embedded in written constructions. Drawing on

cross-linguistic generalizations offered by previous researchers (Akita, 2009, 2017; Dingemanse

and Akita 2017 and Kajitani, 2005), we have performed morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis

to find answers to two specific questions: (1) Are ideophones more iconic than Full Word

Reduplications (FWRs)? (2) Does iconicity gets distributed across different lexical categories in

creative writing? The results reported in sections 3.0 and 4.0 suggest that the answers to both these

questions are affirmative. The operationalization of iconicity levels in Telugu ideophones and

FWRs in this study made use of the parameters mentioned below:

Categorial status and grammatical integration: The auditory and vision + movement

ideophones are more iconic than the Interoception ideophones because, majority of them belong

to quotative adverbial or bare adverbial classes exhibiting more syntactic freedom than

interoception ideophones majority of which are verbs and therefore deeply integrated into the

syntax of the sentences (in literal and figurative language) in which they occur.

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Quantity vs. Similarity principles: The three types of ideophones expressing semantic function

of intensification received higher levels of iconicity since they adhere to quantity principle alone.

Whereas, interpretation of context-bound meanings encoded by most of the FWRs with affix and

sandhi require combination of quantity and similarity principles and hence manifest lower levels

of iconicity.

Semantic functions: Among the 310 FWR tokens, it was type-a in which the base is fully copied

without any changes that was found to be most iconic since they express semantic function of

augmentation. FWR + Affix and FWR + sandhi categories were shown to encode meanings of

attenuation and approximation with somewhat diminished levels of iconicity.

Depiction vs. description: By encoding intensification of meanings, the ideophones seem to

function in a depictive mode of signification, whereas, the FWRs with a wide range of distribution

of semantic properties relating to events, attributes and objects have the potential to function in a

descriptive mode as well, a finding that offers support to Dingemanse’s (2015:961) observation

that reduplication could bridge depiction and description. As a way of conclusion, we offer a

tentative scale of iconicity (see Figure-1) that needs to be validated through future research.

Figure-1: Tentative Scale of iconicity for Telugu

Note 1: The Personally Collected Corpus (PCC) of ideophones and reduplicated forms in Telugu was developed as

part of an investigation funded by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi under their ‘Emeritus Fellow’

scheme sanctioned to Vasanta Duggirala during 2015-2017. E-mail of corresponding author: [email protected]

ICONICITY: HIGH

ICONICITY: MEDIUM ICONICITY: Ideophones

• Auditory

• Vision + movement

• Interoception FWR

• W1=W2

FWR

• W1~W2+Affix FWR

• W1~W2+Sandhi

17

Abbreviations used:

AGR agreement

DAT dative case

FUT Future

LOC Locative

PST past

PTCP participle

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