The rhetorical energy of ideophones

by Jean Lydall

I will begin my presentation with a short clip from my most recent film, "Duka's Dilemma". This will allow the audience to immediately sense the rhetorical energy of ideophones, which merges physical, mental and emotional forces and reverberates between interlocutors, performer and audience, speaker and listener.

Ideophones are expressive words that evoke complex sound-motion pictures or act as intensifiers. They often draw on onomatopoeia and similarities between sensations of speech and other sensations, and utilise prosodic means such as reduplication, lengthening, intonation and volume. They are often accompanied by bodily stance, mimetic movement, gesture and facial expression.

Ideophones give discourse its special spirit. The set of available ideophones shared by members of a particular group characterises their life experiences and the spirit of their culture or sub-culture. Hence they generate feelings of shared mental and emotional states, and shared identity. Conversely, they can be used to exclude outsiders, both intellectually and emotionally.

In Hamar, ideophones often unite interlocutors in an interactive way. When one person is relating a story, the listener may anticipate and supply appropriate ideophones, or the storyteller may demand that the listener echo ideophones. For example, a storyteller tells: "Having left the house, arriving over there …" and a listener says: "kürr", the ideophone which sums up the arrival of a person at a place, how he stops walking and stands still, how the dust settles and the footsteps are silenced, and how he waits for the hosts to notice his arrival and come to greet him.

Ideophones are a-grammatical making no distinction between speaker, hearer and message. Thus they share features with the middle voice, conflating agent with patient, active with passive, transitive with intransitive, subject with object, and actor with action, and - perhaps most importantly -, they do away with the distinction between demonstration and persuasion.