Leiden University Student Repository

Kranenburg, Nelly van (2014)

Iconicity in Akan Ideophones

Bachelor thesis | Afrikaanse talen en culturen (BA)

This thesis report aims to analyze the different types of iconicity present in the Ghanaian language Akan. The ideophones existing in the different dialects of Akan are marked by pitch and placed in the center of focus by their special syntactic place at the boundary of the utterance they belong to. They can be categorized in the semantic domains of sound, movement, touch and vision. Their expressive morphology can add depictive concepts as gradation and iteration to their meaning. Imagic iconicity can be found in onomatopoeic ideophones. Of the possible Gestalt iconic mappings, three are prevalent: reduplication (evoking iteration or distribution), closed monosyllabicity (evoking a unitary event) and prolonged vowel length (evoking duration). Relative iconicity does not seem to be a prevalent feature of Akan ideophones.

Akan

Ideophones

Iconicity

Author

Kranenburg, Nelly van

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

BA African Studies

Supervisors

Nyst, V.A.S.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en