We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language's ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts of use. The major discovery revealed by studying these clips is that ideophones’ meanings can be clarified by means of a distinction found in modality and American Sign Language studies. This distinction between speaker-internal and speaker-external perspective is evident in the intonational and gestural details of ideophones’ use.

Ideophones are described as expressive marked linguistic units with a dramaturgic depictive function. Although commonly regarded in traditional general linguistics as rare and marginal, recent research on this topic has shown that these elements are pervasive in all languages and that they might share some linguistic characteristics across languages. This article analyses Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. The main goal is to describe the structure, meaning and function of Basque ideophones and to discuss how the Basque ideophonic system fits into the cross-linguistic characterisation of these linguistic units.

We argue for the existence of nominal serialization based on our analysis of a Finnish construction consisting of a syntactically fixed sequence in which a prosaic noun is followed by an ideophonic noun. A database compiled from a range of diverse sources provides material for the analysis. Muysken and Veenstra's (2006) criteria for the serialization of verbs are adapted and applied to our analysis of these ideophonic constructions as involving the serialization of nouns. We provide evidence that the noun–noun sequence is nested within a possessive structure that behaves as a syntactic atom, exhibits idiosyncratic phonology, and encodes speaker perspective.

In this article, the author demonstrates that verbal compound constructions involving an ideophone and a light verb represent a widespread syntactic device in the world's languages. The author provides evidence that phono-symbolic morphemes cannot be treated as ‘bare’ direct objects in such constructions. Ideophones appearing in the light verb-adjacent position form a semantic unit with the verbal predicate, despite the fact that in some languages they can be syntacticized as (bare) nouns and appear in argumental position. Specifically, ideophones in complex predicates are part of the verbal domain with which they ‘blend’ (yielding a single predicate) through the mechanism of conflation, along the lines of Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002), and building on Ramchand (2008).