Interjektioner eller ideofoner?

En undersökning av vips och svisch

Abstract

Wiktorsson, Maria, maria.wiktorsson@mau.se, Ph.D., School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University: “Interjections or ideophones? An investigation of two Swedish descriptive interjections”. Språk och stil NF 31, 2021, pp. 72–105.

This study examines the relation between interjections and ideophones in Swedish. Ideophones are expressive words that are colourful depictions, even dramatizations, of events and sensory perceptions. Ideophones demonstrate a lower degree of syntactic integration in language than ordinary words. In linguistic literature, the terms interjection and ideophone are often seen as overlapping and even conflated. The current study examines the treatment of interjections in Swedish language description, focusing on their relation to ideophones. The starting point is a specific group of interjections, »descriptions of events», that contains words sharing many traits with ideophones. Two specific interjections, vips and svisch, are investigated using data from the Swedish Language Bank. The analysis of the corpus data shows that the items pattern very differently. However, both items are found as loosely integrated items, on the one hand, and as fully integrated adverbs and nouns, on the other. The loosely integrated items display forms of sentence integration that are well-described for ideophones cross-linguistically and are therefore interpreted to be ideophones. The integrated uses are discussed from the perspectives of deideophonization and lexicalization of ideophones into non-expressive words. As Swedish has items that qualify as ideophones, the paper argues that Swedish language description needs to accommodate their existence to a greater degree.