Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:06:09.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Expressivity in Scots: A study of echo words

from Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2023

By
Jeffrey P. Williams
Edited by
Jeffrey P. Williams
Jeffrey P. Williams
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
Get access

Summary

Scots, like too many other European languages, is viewed as possessing a dearth of expressivity in spite of evidence to the contrary. This chapter documents the fact that Scots possesses a wide range of forms of expressivity as part of its grammatical repertoire – including most notably echo word formations. Echo words are a type of apophonic reduplication where a root, stem, or other morphosyntactic constituent is partially reduplicated and there is a concomitant change in the echoant; the reduplicated, or copied, portion has no independent semantic value. The change in the copy portion can involve vowel ablaut, consonant alternation/substitution, or tone/register changes.

Keywords

expressivityecho wordsScots
Type
Chapter
Information
Expressivity in European Languages , pp. 91 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akita, Kimi. (2015). Sound symbolism. In Östman, Jan-Ola & Verschueren, Jef (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1–24.Google Scholar
Abbi, Anvita. (1992). Reduplication in South Asian Languages: An areal, typological, and historical study. New Delhi: South Asia Books.Google Scholar
Akita, Kimi & Pardeshi, Prashant (eds.) (2019). Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterji, S. K. (1926). Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press.Google Scholar
Dingemanse, Mark. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and linguistics compass 6(10), 654–72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.361CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dingemanse, Mark. (2015). Ideophones and reduplication: Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse. Studies in language 39(4), 946–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.39.4.05dinGoogle Scholar
Dingemanse, Mark. (2018). Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 3(1), 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emeneau, M. B. (1938). An echo-word motif in Dravidian folk-tales. Journal of the American Oriental Society 58(4): 553.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutzmann, Daniel. (2019). The Grammar of Expressivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haiman, John. (2019). Ideophones and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. (2017). Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 62(2), 196–220. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2017.8Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & Zoll, Cheryl. (2005). Reduplication: Doubling in morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iwasaki, Noriko, Sells, Peter & Akita, Kimi (eds.) (2017). The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from structure, acquisition, and translation. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J., Kimper, Wendell & Mullin, Kevin. (2012). Reduplication in Harmonic Serialism. Morphology 22, 173–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattiello, Elisa. (2013). Extra-Grammatical Morphology in English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nuckolls, Janis. (2003). To be or not to be ideophonically impoverished. Texas Linguistics Forum 47: 131–42.Google Scholar
Robinson, Mairi (ed.) (1985). Concise Scots Dictionary. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Scripture, Edward Wheeler. (1902). Elements of Experimental Phonetics. New York: Scribners.Google Scholar
Voeltz, F. K. Erhard & Kilian-Hatz, Christa (eds.) (2001). Ideophones. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.44Google Scholar
Williams, Jeffrey P. (2004). Ecky-becky: Evidence of Scots echo word morphology in Barbadian English. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 8: 163–70.Google Scholar
Williams, Jeffrey P. (ed.) (2021). Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Williams, Jeffrey P. & Siu, Lap. (2014). The aesthetics of Jarai echo morphology. In Williams, J. P. (ed.) The Aesthetics of Grammar: Sound and meaning in the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 191–206.Google Scholar
Yip, Moira (1998). Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology. In Lapointe, Steven G. & Brentari, Diane K. (eds.) Morphology and Its Relation to Phonology and Syntax. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 216–46.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold & Pullum, Geoffrey (1987). Plain morphology and expressive morphology. In Proceedings of the thirteenth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 330–40.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×