Ideophones – also known as expressives and mimetics – are defined as “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2012, p 674). Typical examples include the following:

Siwu (Ghana)  mukumuku     ‘mouth movements of a toothless person eating’ Dingemanse (2011)

Korean           ulakpulak       ‘unbalanced, scary appearance’ Lee (1992)

Upper Necaxa Totonac (Mexico)                 liplip               ‘sparkling like a diamond or piece of glass’ Beck (2008)

The study of ideophones has its roots in the descriptive study of African languages, where they exist in the thousands and are commonly assumed to form a category on their own, alongside nouns and verbs (Dingemanse 2018; Akita & Dingemanse, 2019). Japanese and Korean linguistics also has a long tradition of the study of ideophonic (mimetic) vocabulary items (e.g. Akita, 2009). In European language study, the main focus has been on onomatopoeia and ideophones, if they have been discussed at all, have often been brushed under the carpet as “curiosities”, “playthings” and “marginal exceptions” that no serious linguist should get entangled with. Although in recent years new research has shown that ideophones exist and are by no means rare in European languages either, many “official” accounts – such as those provided in the grammars of these languages – are still very rudimentary and vague. If ideophones are mentioned at all, this is done in the section/s dealing with word formation, and very little is said about their syntax, semantics or pragmatics.

Swedish is one case in point. Traditional descriptions of Swedish often do not mention ideophones at all. Recent studies acknowledge their existence (see also Dahl 2018, Hagström-Krüger 2019) but even in these accounts there is often no clarity as to how to categorize them syntactically, and especially how to separate them from interjections (see also Dingemanse 2009). In SAG, for example, clearly ideophonic items, such as vips, pladask and svisch, are categorised by default as onomatopoeic interjections and their possible other uses are not addressed. In Swedish dictionaries, on the other hand, we sometimes see the exact opposite; for instance, pladask has been viewed as a member of almost every lexical category that exists.

In this talk we are going to show that while ideophones and interjections have certain similarities in Swedish, these similarities are not enough to motivate a view where ideophones are simply a subcategory of interjections. We will also show, with the help of corpus data, that for many ideophones, the type of multicategoriality described in the dictionaries is quite rare.

Akita, Kimi. 2009: A grammar of sound-symbolic words in Japanese: theoretical approaches to iconic and lexical properties of Japanese mimetics. Doctoral dissertation, Kobe University.

Beck, David. 2008: Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac. In: International Journal of American Linguistics 74(1). pp. 1–46.

Dahl, Östen. 2018: Vips tar ideofonerna revansch. In: Språktidningen, 3, 34–38. Retrieved 2019-03-29 from http://spraktidningen.se/print/artiklar/2018/03/vips-tar-ideofonerna-revansch

Dingemanse, Mark. 2009, November 18: Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries! [web log]. Retrieved from http://ideophone.org/ideophones-are-not-response-cries/

Dingemanse, Mark. 2011: Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. In: Senses & Society 6:1. pp. 77–85.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2012: Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. In: Language and Linguistics Compass 6/10. pp. 654–672.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2018: Redrawing the margins of language: lessons from research on ideophones. In: Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 3(1):4. pp. 1–30.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2019: Ideophone as a comparative concept. In: (eds.) Akita, K. & Pardeshi. P. Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hagström-Krüger, Joakim. 2019: Ideofoners användning i svenska: En korpusundersökning. Ba thesis. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.

Lee, Jin-Seong. 1992: Phonology and sound symbolism of Korean ideophones. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.

SAG = Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan & Andersson, Erik, 1999: Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts Ordbok.