The Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones’ Overlapping Modes : A Case Study of Ethnic Minority Languages in China

Ideophones are words that express meaning directly by way of sound, mimicking or describing sound, shape, color, nature, action, etc. These words make language expressions more vivid and lively, and add flexibility, user-friendliness and understandability to the language in the meantime. Ideophones are not a common existence in languages all over the world, thus they are specific to certain individual languages. Although they are not commonly seen in all languages, ideophones can be found geographically in various major language families in eastern Asia, especially rich in Chinese and some of its related languages and neighboring languages. Compared with other word studies, research on ideophones started relatively late and thus lack depth. The current academic discussions on sorting through and introducing ideophones are far from enough. Moreover, present studies on ideophones are inadequate and relatively sporadic, involving no more than two types of languages with no description nor analysis from a cross-linguistic perspective, and there are fewer research results in conjunction with linguistic typology, which are indispensable to the study of ideophones. Basing on a cross-linguistic and a cross-dialectal comparison of ideophones among ethnic minority languages in China from the perspective of linguistic typology, linguistic inventory typology in particular, the present paper makes an analysis of cross-language forms of ideophones in terms of “overlapping mode” from China’s ethnic minority languages.