Ideophonic sequences: Challenging the asymmetric syntactic structure hypothesis

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper challenges the hypothesis that ideophonic sequences are syntactic structures built from lexical roots by the recursive operation Merge through the mediation of a functional head, taken to be either a coordinate (Corver 2015) or a determiner (Corver 2023). Drawing on Generative Grammar theory and new data from Brazilian Portuguese, we argue that the evidence for this hypothesis is weak at best. We first show that these sequences do not behave consistently as constituents. While they can stand alone, be coordinated, and resist intrusion, they fail to undergo movement and ellipsis. Taken together, this suggests that they are most likely linear sequences. They lack the formal features responsible for mediating grammatical interactions with the surrounding syntactic context and on which asymmetric structures are built. Moreover, the evidence on which Corver relies is mostly phonological and as such does not provide strong support for the conclusion that ideophonic sequences are asymmetric structures. Following the general tenets of Minimalism, we conclude that, in the absence of strong and uncontroversial evidence, it is best to assume that sequences formed by canonical ideophones are linear strings or symmetric structures distinct from ordinary syntactic phrases.