The discussion of ideophones cannot be separated from the constructions where they appear. In the literature, the following three construction types are probably most frequently referred to: (i) the use of ideophones in isolation, (ii) the combina- tion with verbs that express the same or a similar meaning that is often partly red- undant, as argued by Derbyshire (1977: 178) for Hixkaryána (e.g., nomokyatxkonà, àhpo ‘they_used_to_come, action_of_arriving’), and (iii) the combination with
14 “Die von den Grammatikern unerửrtert gelassene Eigentỹmlichkeit ist, dass die Schallworte im Litauischen eine feste grammatische Form haben. Sie enden auf t, st, szt und müssen von (sic!) dem t konsonantischen Anlaut des zu Grunde liegenden verbalen oder nicht verbalen Elementes haben, das ich im folgenden der Kürze wegen als Wurzel bezeichnen werde, so dass man, so weit ich habe beobachten kửnnen, von Verben vokalisch auslautender Wurzel, z.B. lú-ti bellen, solche Rufe nicht bildet” (Leskien 1902/1903: 168).
bleached light verbs, most characteristically ‘go’, ‘do/make’, and/or ‘say’, as in English Ding-dong went the door bell.
A characteristic feature of Lithuanian ideophones is that type (iii) – used with bleached light verbs – is almost completely lacking. In Palangos Juzė, it is not attested and also in Jašinskaitė (1975), there are hardly any examples. This does not mean that ideophones cannot be combined with ‘go’ and ‘say’, but if they are, they are rather of type (ii): The verbs are used in their literal meaning as in (12):
(12) Ideophone with motion event (Valančius 1996: 13)
bet nugis styri styri ei-kim gul-ti
but now ideo ideo go-imp.1pl sleep-inf
‘but let us now styri styri go to bed’
In (12), eiti ‘go’ is used in its literal sense of motion; styrì specifies the manner of motion ‘slow going with stiff legs (from cold or long sitting)’. Actually, the use of ideophones to express motion events (notably manner of motion) is very common in Lithuanian. The first two semantic groups of Jašinskaitė (1975: 57–70) in her semantic subclassification are horizontal and vertical motion.
However, it might be argued that the use of type (iii) with light verbs is a secondary development, due to grammaticalization – or more specifically, semantic bleaching. Lithuanian could then be taken as an example to show that there are languages where stage (ii) is attested, but (iii) is lacking. A problem with this argument is that type (iii) is not the exception, but rather the rule in the lan- guages of the world. For most languages where ideophones have been described, there are also examples with ‘go’, ‘say’ (or other non-verbal quotative markers), or ‘make’ beyond their literal motion, speech, or production domain uses. This holds even for most European languages; consider (13) from Italian:
(13) Italian (Sicilian) (Camilleri 1998)
ciaf, ciaf, fac-ev-a distint-amente la sabbia vagnàt-a ideo ideo make-ipv:pst-3sg distinctive-adv art:f sand wet-f ‘ciaf, ciaf, made the wet sand distinctively’ [from the steps of the mafia- hired killer approaching]
This means that what would have to be explained is why Lithuanian lacks type (iii), rather than why English, German, Italian, Mordvin (Wọlchli 2005: 164), and all the other languages have it.
A compensation for the lacking type (iii) is another construction type that is not frequently discussed in the literature on ideophones: the use of ideophones instead of verbs and with the valency of the verbs they can be claimed to replace
(see also Andersen 2009: 126).15 In example (14) from a newspaper article, the ideophone triaukš ‘eating’ has an accusative object in the same way as the verb valgyti ‘eat’ would have in this context and the verb phrase headed by the ideo- phone is coordinated with another verb phrase headed by the verb form užsigers
‘will drink until filled’. The verb form is marked for future tense, which is used here in a habitual sense. Despite the conditional construction, the ideophone is not at all out of place here because the contextual interpretation is factual. This is what parents and elder children do, and following their example, so do babies.
(14) Ideophone with the valency of a verb and coordinated with a verb Kūdikiai mok-o-si turė-dam-i
baby-nom.pl learn-prs3-refl have-cnv:ss:sim-nom:pl:m prieš ak-is
before eye-acc.pl pavyzd-į – jus.
example-acc.sg you[2pl:acc]
Taigi jei mam-a, tėt-is, vyresn-ieji
thus if mummy-nom.sg daddy-nom.sg elder-def.nom.pl.m broli-ai ir ses-ės kasdien triaukš
brother-nom.pl and sister-nom.pl every.day ideo saldaini-us, traškuči-us, pusfabrikači-us bei sweet-acc.pl snack-acc.pl half.fabricate-acc.pl and už-si-ger-s gazuot-ais gėrim-ais
pv-refl-drink-fut.3 carbonated-ins.pl drink-ins.pl
ūgtelė-jęs mažyl-is dary-s
grow.quickly.a.bit-ptc.pst.act.nom.sg.m little.one-nom.sg do-fut.3
lygi-ai t-ą pat-į.
exactly that-acc.sg self-acc.sg
‘Babies learn by keeping in front of their eyes an example – you. So if mother, father, elder brothers and sisters every day triaukš sweets, snacks, convenience food and tank up with carbonated drinks, the quickly a little growing little one will do the same.’
15 Tom Güldemann points out to me that the same is possible in Shona:
imbwá héyo pikú nyáma mu-mbá washu toro
9.dog pres:9.dem ideo:snatch meat ine-house ideo:run ideo:disappear
‘There is the dog taking the meat from the house, running off and disappearing’ (Fortune 1971: 250).
To put it differently, it looks as if Lithuanian ideophones can behave syn- tactically as if they were verbs and exhibit a high degree of syntactic integration in this use.16 For further examples of this use, see examples (4) and (9). There is no research on exactly how frequent this construction type is, but it is perhaps not equally common for all varieties of Lithuanian. According to Zinkevičius (1981: 201), ištiktukai replacing verbs are characteristic of those parts of Lithua- nia where they are more widespread: Žemaitian (Low Lithuanian) and in Eastern Aukštaitian (Eastern High Lithuanian) rather than in Central Lithuanian where they are more restricted. However, Palangos Juzė is an obvious counterexample.
Even though ideophones are frequent in that text, there are only seven occurren- ces (3.3%) without an accompanying verb (in some of them, there is a prepositio- nal complement or a dative object, but there is no example with a direct object).
The types of syntactic constructions ideophones can occur in various varieties of Lithuanian and their correlation with the overall frequency of ideophones is a topic for further research. We can conclude, however, that Lithuanian ideopho- nes are cross-linguistically unusual in that they show no tendency to be used with semantically bleached verbs; furthermore, in some varieties of Lithuanian, they can be used instead of full verbs and “take over” their valency.