Banjade, Goma

Bickel, Balthasar

Gaenszle, Martin

Lieven, Elena

Paudyal, Netra P.

Rai, Ichchha

Rai, Manoj

Rai, Novel Kishore

Stoll, Sabine

Rai, N.

Bickel, B.

Banjade, G.

Gaenszle, M.

Lieven, E.

Paudyal, N.

Rai, I.

Rai, M.

Stoll, S.

MPG.PuRe

Triplication and ideophones in Chintang

Max Planck Society eDoc Server

Paudyal, Netra P

Rai, Ichchha Purna

ZORA

Zurich Open Repository andArchiveUniversity of ZurichMain LibraryStrickhofstrasse 39CH-8057 Zurichwww.zora.uzh.chYear: 2005Triplication and ideophones in ChintangRai, Novel Kishore; Bickel, Balthasar; Gaenszle, Martin; Lieven, Elena; Paudyal, Netra P; Rai, IchchhaPurna; Rai, Manoj; Stoll, SabineAbstract: UnspecifiedPosted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of ZurichZORA URL: http://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-76564Originally published at:Rai, Novel Kishore; Bickel, Balthasar; Gaenszle, Martin; Lieven, Elena; Paudyal, Netra P; Rai, IchchhaPurna; Rai, Manoj; Stoll, Sabine (2005). Triplication and ideophones in Chintang. In: Yadava, YogendraP. Current issues in Nepalese linguistics. Kirtipur: Linguistic Society of Nepal, 205-209. 1Triplication and ideophones in Chintang  Novel Kishore Rai1, Balthasar Bickel2, Goma Banjade1, Martin Gaenszle2, Elena Lieven3, Netra Paudyal1, Ichchha Purna Rai1, Manoj Rai1, and Sabine Stoll3  1Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu 2University of Leipzig 3Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig    I. Introduction  It is generally observed that most of the Kiranti languages have relatively few monomorphemic adverbs. What is common instead is adverbs based on reduplication or triplication and involving regular or ideophonic (onomatopoetic) roots. In this paper we discuss triplication in Chintang.1 Triplication has been discussed only for a few languages, for example in Bantawa (Rai & Winter 1997), another Kiranti language, and in Tibetan (Uray 1954) and the Austronesian language Thao (Blust 2001).   II. Formation  Triplication in Chintang is formed by repeating a base twice and adding an adverbializing suffix –wa. The base can be a nominal or verbal root with a regular lexical meaning, but often the base is an ideophonic element. Compare the following examples:  1.  rak-rak-rak-wa    mi  om-no (burning red coal)-ADVLZ fire  burn-NPST ‘The fire burns very strongly.’  2.  hɨk-hɨk-hɨk-wa   hɨk   phan-no (wind/air)-ADVLZ  wind/air blow-NPST ‘It is very windy.’  3.  huŋgo them-them-them-wa kon-no 3  (lost)-ADVLZ   walk-NPST ‘S/he walks aimlessly.’                                                          1 Research on Chintang (ISO 639-3: ctn) is currently being conducted in the framework of the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP, www.uni-leipzig.de/~ff/cpdp) supported by theVW Foundation, Grant No. II/79 092, 2004-2007 (PI B. Bickel). CPDP is part of the Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LINSUN) program initiated by the Central Department of Linguistics at the Tribhuvan University. For further results of the Chintang project, see Gaenszle et al. (2005, this volume) and Bickel et al. (2005).  24.  paĩ  chɨk-chɨk-chɨk-wa cuŋ  lus-no today (pinch)-ADVLZ  cold feel-NPST ‘It is very cold today’  5.  asin-da   rep-rep-rep-wa   nam nud-e yesterday-LOC (ideophone)-ADVLZ  sun  good-PST ‘Yesterday the sunshine was very bright.’  6.  akko a-phuwa    dɨk-dɨk-dɨk-wa   lis-e 1sGEN 1sPOSS-elder.brother (Ideophone)-ADVLZ  become-PST ‘My elder brother became seriously ill.’ (no more moving, like a log)  In examples (1) and (2). rak and hɨk are nominal roots meaning ‘burning coal’ and ‘wind, air’, respectively. Example (3) and (4) involve the verb roots them- and chɨk-, meaning ‘be(come) lost’ and ‘pinch’, respectively. (5) and (6) are based on the roots rep and dɨk which are ideophones, and as such fall outside the regular syntactic category system. Despite these categorical differences, all three types are marked by the same suffix -wa and the resulting form is always an adverb. As we will see later, this adverbial form can also be further inflected in order to derive an adjective.  In many languages, triplication can be successfully analyzed as recursive reduplication, i.e. a triplicated form results from reduplicating an already reduplicated form (cf., among others, Singh & Wee 2002). Thus, from the colloquial English of Singapore, Singh & Wee (2002) report such forms as cough-cough ‘keep coughing’ along with cough-cough-cough ‘keep on coughing’, This is not so in Chintang, for the following reasons. First, not every triplicated form also allows a reduplicated form. For example, speakers reject reduplicated forms of rak ‘burning coal’ in example (1) or the ideophonic root rep in example (5). Some triplicated forms have reduplicated alternatives, e.g. the ideophonic dɨk is also attested in reduplicated form:  7.  mahima-ŋa  kanchi   u-thaũ-be=ta sickness-ERG K.   3sPOSS-place-LOC=FOC  dɨk-dɨk-wa    lis-ad-a-ŋs-e. (ideophone)-ADVLZ  be-TEL-PST-PERF-PST  ‘Kanchi has become so ill that she could not move.’  But the fact that not all triplicated forms have reduplicated alternants suggests that in Chintang triplication is distinct from recursive reduplication. Another difference between reduplication and triplication in Chintang is that the adverbializer –wa is obligatory with triplicated forms, but optional with reduplicated forms.2 Thus alongside examples with –wa as in (7), we also find examples like the following:                                                          2 We do not know yet the conditions governing the use of –wa in reduplicated forms. The adverbializer is obligatory in cases of partial reduplication (postreduplication), as in omchek-omchek > omchekchekwa ‘tidy, clean’. We leave the analysis of reduplication to another study.  38.   bago  pak-pak   kok    ca-no. DEM (ideophone) cooked.rice  eat-NPST ‘This one eats without ever stopping.’   These formal differences between triplication and reduplication suggest that in Chintang triplication is directly generated from its base, not via recursive redupli-cation.   III. Triplication and Syllabic Structure  The bases which undergo triplication are monosyllabic, and can take any shape that Chintang syllables can normally have: CVC, VC, CV, CVV. The following examples illustrate these bases:   9.  mi  sip-sip-sip-wa    yuŋ-no fire  blink.one’s.eye-ADVLZ  be(come)-NPST ‘The fire is (or: is becoming) very weak.’  10.  a-nisa      ɨk-ɨk-ɨk-wa    hab-e 1sPOSS-younger.sibling  (ideophone)-ADVLZ  cry-PST ‘My younger brother/sister cried for a long time.’  11.  te-te-te-wa   num cho-no (ideohone)-ADVLZ salt  strong-NPST ‘The salt is too much strong.’  12.  cha  duda kui-kui-kui-wa   thuŋ-no baby milk (ideophone)-ADVLZ drink-NPST ‘The baby drinks milk continuously (with some noise)’  We have collected nearly 100 triplicated Chintang forms and about 95% of them have a CVC structure. There are no instances of disyllabic bases undergoing triplication.   IV.Triplication, ideophones, and parts of speech  As we saw above, triplication in Chintang is often based on ideophonic elements. Under a classical definition, an ideophone is “a vivid representation of an idea in sound, a word often onomatopeic, which describe a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.” (Doke 1935: 118). Based on a recent survey, Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz (2001: 1) conclude that “the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound symbolism. Finally it was clear that ideophones are part of spoken language-the language register, where gestures could be used-rather than written language. It was not surprising that ideophones are often accompanied by gestures or even considered as “vocal gesture” (e.g. in Japanese, in Southern Soho or in the Australian  Jaminjung).” Ideophones are extremely common in the  4languages of the world, but because of the traditional priviledge enjoyed by written genres they have received little attention in the theoretical literature. It is often noted that ideophones do not fall into the regular system of syntactic categories or parts-of-speech. For Tibetan, Uray (1954) concludes that triplication only occurs with ideophones (onomatopoetic words), so that “their sematic content and the part of speech they belong to might be unsettled, fluctuating” (Uray 1954:239). In Thao (Blust 2001), by contrast, the base is always a verb and the resulting triplicated form is also a verb with some intensity of meaning to it. Blust explicates the semantics as ‘[+ more of the same]’ (but see Singh & Wee 2002 for discussion). Chintang is different from both types of languages: the base can be a verbal, nominal, or ideophonic root while the output of triplication is always an adverb, marked as such by –wa.   V. Further derivation of triplicated forms  Triplicated forms are always adverbs in Chintang. As such, they have the same morphological and syntactic valences as other adverbs. In particular, like other adverbs, they can be used as attributes in an NP by adding the nominalizer clitic =ko ~ =go  ‘NMLZ’. Consider the following pairs of examples, where the a-versions illustrate an adverbial and the b-versions an adnominal use of triplicated forms:  13. (a) phak-hi  tok-tok-tok-wa   nam-no pig-shit  (ideophone)-ADVLZ  smell-NPST ‘The pig-shit smells very strongly’   (b) tok-tok-tok-wa=go    phak-hi (ideophone)-ADVLZ=NMLZ  pig-shit ‘Very strong smelling pig-shit’  The clitic =go is the regular marker of adnominal attributes based on monomorphemic adverbs (14), nominal or pronominal stems bearing adverbial cases (15), and on clauses (16):  14.  anemnɨŋ=go  kaya last.year=NMLZ  rice.paddy ‘last year’s paddy’  15.  yo-lam=go      sɨŋraŋ-ce (clan_his.016) ACROSS-MEDIATIVE=NMLZ  tree-ns ‘the trees from over there’  16.  u-cekt-u-gond-o-ko=go       katha (tiger.008) 3nsA-speak-3P-AMBULATIVE-3P-NPST=NMZL story ‘a story that they tell around here.’  Triplicated forms cannot be used in adnominal position directly, without =go; and =go cannot be suffixed to triplicated forms without –wa-derivation: for instance, it is not possible to form *tok-tok-tok=go-wa instead of tok-tok-tok-wa=go in (13b).  5  VI. Conclusion  Our findings suggest the following properties of triplication in Chintang:  i. Triplication is mostly based on single syllables, and it always involves complete bases (not parts of them) ii. Unlike other languages, base syllables can not only come from verbal but also from nominal and ideophonic roots. Triplicated forms are obligatorily marked by an adverbializing suffix -wa.   iii. Reduplication and triplication are likely to constitute two different and independent processes iv. Like in other languages triplication contributes to intensify the meaning and is to some degree iconic.  Triplicated forms marked by –wa are very common in Chintang discourse, and they compensate to a substantial degree for the lack of monomorphemic adverbs in the language. Chintang has no written tradition, and this is probably part of the reasons why triplication often involves ideophonic bases, or has itself an ideophonic tone to it. However, once the language will be written, there is a danger for the original ideophonic representations to be lost. Therefore, documenting ideophones is an important, in fact essential, task of endangered languages research, and in our current research project, large collections of Chintang ideophones will be deposited in the DOBES archive (www.mpi.nl/dobes).   References  Bickel, B., G. Banjade, M. Gaenszle, E. Lieven, N. Paudyal, I. Rai, M. Rai, N. K. Rai & S. Stoll 2005. News from the Himalayas: languages with free prefix ordering. Ms., U. Leipzig, available at  www.uni-leipzig.de/~bickel/research/papers. Blust, R. 2001. Thao triplication. Oceanic Linguistics 40, 324 – 335. Doke, C. M. 1935. Bantu linguistic terminology. London: Longmans. Gaenszle, M., B. Bickel, G. Banjade, E. Lieven, N. Paudyal, A. Rai, I. P. Rai, M. Rai, N. K. Rai, V. S. Rai, N. P. Gautam (Sharma) & S. Stoll 2005. Research report: the Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP). European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 28, 95 – 103. Rai, N. K. & W. Winter 1997. Triplicated verbal adjuncts in Bantawa. In Bradley, D. (ed.) Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, 135 – 155. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics (A – 86). Singh, R. & L. Wee 2002. On so-called triplication in colloquial Singapore English and Thao: a response to Blust, in memory of Stan Starosta. Oceanic Linguistics 41, 514 – 522. Uray, G. 1954. Duplication, gemination, and triplication in Tibetan. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungarica 4, 177 – 241. Voeltz, E. F. K. & C. Kilian-Hatz 2001 [eds.]. Ideophones. Amsterdam: Benjamins.   

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Triplication and ideophones in Chintang

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