Abstract
ABB words in Chinese, e.g., hēi-qīqī ‘pitch black’, have been studied for a long time. Most traditional studies analyze these words through derivational rules involving empty suffixes. However, this is problematic, as they are better seen as compounds involving a prosaic A and an ideophonic BB part. By treating ABB as a schema sanctioned by collocate–ideophonic constructions, it is possible to investigate other similar patterns. A corpus study (more than 5,000 tokens) revealed that on the level of schemas, ABB truly acts as a prototype of such constructions, but that it is far from the only pattern to be identified. A second corpus-based study on the level of exemplars showed there are different pockets of salience and non-uniformity in the data from four angles: cue validity, frequency, dispersion, and constructional preference. This paper provides evidence that the traditional ABB narrative needs to be complemented with usage-based data, and grapple with the lexical salience effects this brings along for words involving iconicity.
Acknowledgements
This paper is an expanded and updated version of a section in my dissertation (Van Hoey 2020). As such, I would like to thank Chiarung Lu and our lab members working on Cognitive and Functional linguistics at National Taiwan University for helping me to work out the general concept. I am also very grateful for the feedback garnered during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong in the Language Development Lab, in particular to Youngah Do and Xiaoyu Yu for inspiring discussions on ABB and ideophonehood. Finally, a huge thanks to three anonymous reviewers who challenged a number of the assumptions made here, and who also helped me to improve the quality of the manuscript in a significant manner. The usual disclaimers apply.
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