Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) - Hardcover

Nuckolls, Janis B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195089855 ISBN 13: 9780195089851

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Sound-symbolism occurs when words resemble the sounds associated with the phenomena they attempt to describe, rather than an arbitrary representation. For example the word raven is arbitrary in that it does not resemble a raven; cuckoo, however, is sound -symbolic in that it resembles the bird's call.

In Sounds Like Life, Janis Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words in Pastaza Quechua (a dialect of Quechua), which is spoken in eastern Ecuador. The use of sound-symbolic words is much more prevalent in Pastaza Quechua than in any other language, and they symbolize a wider range of sensory perceptions including sounds, rhythms, and visual patterns. Nuckolls uses discourse data from everyday contexts to demonstrate the Quechua speakers' elaborate schematic perceptual structure to describe experience through sound-symbolic language. With words for contact with a surface, opening and closing, falling, sudden realizations, and moving through water and space, Nuckolls finds that sound-symbolism is integral to the Quechua speakers' way of thinking about and expressing their experience of the world.

About this title

From the Back Cover

All languages feature sound symbolism, which occurs when the form of a linguistic utterance resembles in some way what it describes or refers to. Onomatopoeic words, such as thump and whack, are a couple of examples from English. For English speakers and other westerners, however, sound symbolism is relegated to whimsical styles of speech and writing. In Sounds Like Life, Janis Nuckolls argues that sound symbolism is integrated with the grammar of Pastaza Quechua, a dialect spoken in eastern Ecuador. With data from brief exchanges, sustained dialogues, explanatory accounts, narratives of personal experience, and myths, Nuckolls explores the ways in which abstract grammatical concepts, such as duration and completiveness, are communicated through sound-symbolic images. Moreover, the evidence from sound symbolism's grammatical patterning, its performative foregrounding in multiple contexts of use, and its ability to trigger memories of key life experiences, suggests that for the Pastaza Quechua sound symbolism is more than a style of speaking. It is a style of thinking about oneself as connected, by the sounds that resonate through one's body, with the natural world. This book offers the first detailed study of the grammatical properties of sound symbolism, which has significant implications for grammatical theory. Nuckolls challenges the traditional conceptions of aspect grammar, demonstrating that in Pastaza Quechua, grammatical representations of duration and completiveness depend on speakers' spatial and perceptual experience, and are embodied within the nature of linguistic communication.

About the Author

Janis B. Nuckolls is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0195089855
• ISBN 13: 9780195089851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312