On the Syntactic Status of Edo Ideophones

Abstract

Ideophones are a particular lexical class of expressive words depicting perceptual events or states, and are said to be a universal or near-universal feature of language (Dingemanse, 2012:655; Kilian-Hatz, 2001:163). This paper presents an overview of Ẹdo ideophones to characterize them in terms of their occurrence in grammatical syntactic frames. It investigates what sets them apart within word classes in Ẹdo and how they differ from their non-ideophonic counterparts in sentential constructions. The Basic Linguistic Theory was adopted as the method for data analysis. This was done to show how ideophones manifest syntactically in the language. Ideophones appear in copular frames with some verbs in the language, especially the verb ‘to be’. This paper concludes that Ẹdo ideophones do not occur pre-nominally in the language.

Keywords

• ideophones
• modification
• question
• ẹdo
• nouns
• verbs