Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:46:31.303Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Analysing expressives in a spoken corpus of Majorcan Catalan

from Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2023

By
Nicolau Dols
Edited by
Jeffrey P. Williams
Jeffrey P. Williams
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
Get access

Summary

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

Keywords

expressivityiconicityideophonesMajorcan Catalan
Type
Chapter
Information
Expressivity in European Languages , pp. 269 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Albers, S. (2008). Lautsymbolik in Ägyptischen Texten. Mainz: Von Zabern.Google Scholar
Alcover, A. M. (1996–2022). Aplec de Rondaies Mallorquines d’En Jordi d’es Racó, edited by Grimalt, J. A. & Guiscafrè, J.. 9 vols. Palma: Editorial Moll.Google Scholar
Auracher, J., Albers, S., Zhai, Y., Gareeva, G., & Stavniychuk, T. (2010). P is for happiness, N is for sadness: Universals in sound iconicity to detect emotions in poetry. Discourse Processes, 48, 1–25.Google Scholar
Aryani, A., Ullrich, S., Kraxenberger, M., & Jacobs, A. M. (2015). Measuring the basic affective tone of poems via phonological saliency and iconicity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(2), 191–204.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (1992–2022). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program]. Version 6.2.06, retrieved 23 January 2022 from www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/Google Scholar
Choksi, N. (2020). Expressives and the multimodal depiction of social types in Mundari. Language in Society, 49(3), 379–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diffloth, G. (1979). Expressive phonology and prosaic phonology in Mon-Khmer. In Thongkum, T. L. et al. (eds.) Studies in Tai and Mon-Khmer Phonetics and Phonology in Honour of Eugénie J. A. Henderson. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press, 49–59.Google Scholar
Dingemanse, M. (2011). Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and iconicity in Siwu. In Michelucci, P., Fischer, O., & Ljungberg, C. (eds.) Semblance and Signification. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 39–54.Google Scholar
Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(10), 654–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dingemanse, M. & Akita, K. (2017). An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese. Journal of Linguistics, 53, 501–32.Google Scholar
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603–15.Google Scholar
Dols, N. (2020). Phonology. Phonetics. Intonation. In Argenter, J. A. & Lüdtke, J., (eds.) Manual of Catalan Linguistics. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 101–28.Google Scholar
Guiscafrè, Jaume. (2007). Antoni M. Alcover, father of the Mallorcan folktale canon. Ooohéee: Estudis sobre la creació i edició infantil i juvenil, 3, 58–80.Google Scholar
Heinz, J. M. & Stevens, K. N. (1961). On the properties of voiceless fricatives. Journal of the Acoustica Society of America, 33(5), 589–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
High, C. (2018). Bodies that speak: Languages of differentiation and becoming in Amazonia. Language & Communication, 63, 65–75.Google Scholar
Hiraga, M. K. (1994). Diagrams and metaphors: Iconic aspects in language. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 5–21.Google Scholar
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2017). Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 62(2), 196–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jongman, A., Wayland, R., & Wong, S. (2000). Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108(3), 1252–63.Google Scholar
Kwon, N. & Yu, S. (2018). Experimental evidence for the productivity of total reduplication in Japanese ideophones and ordinary vocabulary. Language Sciences, 66, 166–82.Google Scholar
Lee, A. P. (2017). Ideophones, interjections, and sound symbolism in Seediq. Oceanic Linguistics, 56(1), 181–209.Google Scholar
Lennes, M. (2002). calculate_segment_durations.praat [Script for Praat]. Zenodo. https://bit.ly/3kR54tYGoogle Scholar
Masuda, K. (2007). The physical basis for phonological iconicity. In Tabakowska, E., Ljungberg, C., & Fischer, O. (eds.) Insistent Images. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 57–72.Google Scholar
Matsuo, K. & Palmer, J. B. (2009). Coordination of mastication, swallowing and breathing. Japanese Dental Science Review, 45, 31–40.Google Scholar
Moshi, L. (1993). Ideophones in KiVunjo-Chaga. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology , 3(2), 185–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nuckolls, Janis B. (1999). The case for sound symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 225–52.Google Scholar
Nuckolls, Janis B. (2006). The neglected poetics of ideophony. In O’Neil, Catherine, Scoggin, Mary, & Tuite, Kevin (eds.) Language, Culture and the Individual. Munich: LINCOM Europa, 39–50.Google Scholar
O’Meara, C., Kung, S. S., & Majid, A. (2019). The challenge of olfactory ideophones reconsidering ineffability from the Totonac-Tepehua perspective. International Journal of American Linguistics, 85(2), 173–212.Google Scholar
Ponsonnet, M. (2018). Expressivity and performance: Expressing compassion and grief with a prosodic contour in Gunwinyguan languages (northern Australia). Journal of Pragmatics, 136, 79–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pradilla Cardona, M. À. (2002). Ensordiment, espirantització i fenòmens que afecten les sibilants. In Solà, J., Lloret, M. R., Mascaró, J., & Pérez Saldanya, M. (eds.) Gramàtica del Català Contemporani, Vol. 1. Barcelona: Empúries, 287‒318.Google Scholar
Recasens, D. (2013). On the articulatory classification of (alveolo)palatal consonants. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 43(1), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reidy, P. F. (2016). Spectral dynamics of sibilant fricatives are contrastive and language specific. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(4), 2518–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.Google Scholar
Sondhi, S., Khan, M., Vijay, R., Salshan, A. K., & Chouhan, S. (2015). Acoustic analysis of speech under stress. International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 11(5), 417–32.Google Scholar
Uther, H.-J. (2004). The Types of International Folktales: A classification and bibliography, based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. 3 vols. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia-Academia Scientiarum Fennica.Google Scholar
Wheeler, M., Yates, A., & Dols, N. (1999). Catalan: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiseman, M. & van Peer, W. (2003). Roman Jakobsons Konzept der Selbstreferenz aus der Perspektive der heutigen Kognitionswissenschaft. In Birus, H., Donat, S., & Meyer-Sickendiek, B. (eds.) Roman Jakobsons Gedichtanalysen. Göttingen: Wallstein, 277–306.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×