The at-issue status of ideophones: An experimental approach

Formal linguistics generally assumes that form-meaning relations in spoken language are arbitrary and not iconic. Ideophones, such as the English splish-splash and helter-skelter, have long been considered one of the few examples of lexicalised iconicity in spoken language and exceptions to the general rule of arbitrariness. Recently, however, researchers have begun to examine iconicity in spoken language more closely. Following work which established the default not-at-issue status of iconic co-speech gestures, here we present what we believe to be the first experimental work on the at-issue status of ideophones. In sentence-context matching tasks, German speakers rated target sentences containing sentence-medial ideophones more favourably in mismatching conditions than those containing adverbials. We presume that speaker judgements’ concerning how well target sentences match discourse contexts should be more impaired by mismatches induced by at-issue material than those induced by not at-issue material. We argue that speakers’ ratings indicate that sentence-medial ideophones are not at-issue. We do, however, highlight cases where ideophones appear to have an at-issue interpretation, for which we propose an initial analysis. Overall, our results provide a starting point for understanding the pragmatic status of ideophones and provide evidence that iconic, but conventionalised linguistic items, which occur in the spoken modality, can also contribute not-at-issue information as iconic gestures do in the visual modality.