Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye

RTG PhD student, member since 2024

Project “Ideophones and co-speech gestures in Ga”

This project broadly explores the interaction between ideophones and other iconic enrichments such as gestures, in Ga (a Kwa language spoken in Accra, Ghana). Typological research has shown that many typologically different spoken languages have ideophones, a special class of words which can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery. Although ideophones can be found in ‘ideophone languages (ILs)’ and ‘non-ideophonic languages (NILs)’, ideophones in ILs are clearly more conventionalized and lexicalized compared to NILs. Building on first observations about co-ideophone gestures in Ga, I generally expect an ideophone in an (IL) like Ga to be accompanied by the same or very similar gestures more frequently than ideophones in a NIL like German. I also find it interesting to later compare particularly, the (conventionalized) ideophone-accompanying gestures in Ga to ideophone-like expressions in selected sign languages.

Academic background:

I had my Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Linguistics and Master’s degree in Linguistics both at the University of Ghana. My Master’s thesis which was supervised by Reginald Akuoko Duah, Yvonne Agbetsoamedo and Cornelia Ebert, broadly explored the semantics of ideophones in Ga (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana) and further investigated their at-issue status in the language. I am very interested in iconicity both in spoken languages and in the visual modality.

Publications/Conference presentations:

Asiedu, P., Asamoah, M. B., Barnes, K., Duah, R., Ebert, C., Neequaye, J. N. A., ... & Stender, T. (2023, June). On the information status of ideophones in Akan. In Annual Conference of African Languages (Vol. 45).