The enactive iconicity of ideophone semantics

Abstract This chapter reviews the existing research on the semantics of ideophones, a class of words that communicate sensory perceptions, emotions, and cognitive attributions with linguistic sounds, intonation, and gesture. The sense relations of ideophones, including their synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, and polysemy, are discussed. Their semantic flexibility and context sensitivity, as well as sensori-based and embodied meanings, are explained. The culturally sensitive semantics of ideophones is touched upon, and research tools and methodologies, including archival resources and experimental methods for studying ideophone semantics, are outlined. The role of gestures in communicating the iconic meanings of ideophones is discussed for its relevance to the problem of disentangling ideophone semantics from pragmatics. Finally, the complexities of the iconic semantics of ideophones are discussed in relation to current views of perception as an active construction, involving contextualization cues of segmental properties and prosody, as well as sensori-semantic features, especially from articulatory and manual gestures.