SALT 26. doi: 10.3765/salt.v26i0.3786, and as an invited talk at LENLS 2015.
This paper develops a novel formal semantics for ideophones that can account for their meaning and compositional properties. The proposal extends recent work on iconicity in sign languages by Davidson (2015), whose demonstration-based framework provides a formal foundation for the semantics of ideophones that captures the difference between descriptive meaning and depictive meaning, the kind of meaning ideophones traffic in. After providing a demonstration-based account of the basic ideophone construction in the Mayan language Tseltal, the paper then shows how the demonstration-based account can be used to analyze pluractionality in the ideophone domain. In particular, through case studies on Tseltal and Upper Necaxa Totonac (Totonacan), I show that there are two previously unrecognized types of ideophonic pluractionality, and that their properties support the demonstration-based account. The first, which I call "demonstration-external pluractionality", involves a speaker using an ideophone to do a plurality of demonstrations that characterize a plurality of events. The second kind of ideophonic pluractionality, which I call a "demonstration-internal pluractionality", is much more similar to pluractionality in the verbal domain, and involves special morphology that derives ideophone stems that can only be used to demonstrate plural events. Finally, I use the contrast between these two types of pluractionality in the ideophone domain to clarify the line between the iconic and non-iconic aspects of the semantics of ideophones.