Expressives and the multimodal depiction of social types in Mundari

Abstract

Present in many of the world's languages, expressives (also called ideophones or mimetics) are commonly discussed as iconic ‘depictions’ of speaker's sensual experiences. Yet anthropologists and linguists working with these constructions have noticed that they also index ‘social types’ that perdure across interactional events. This article analyzes the semiotic relation between depiction and social stereotypes embedded in expressive use by examining video data from interviews with speakers of Mundari, an expressive-rich Austro-Asiatic language spoken in eastern India. Presenting interview data taken from both lab-based elicitations as well as ethnographic interviews in Mundari-speaking villages, the article claims that speakers deploy multimodal resources such as gesture and gaze in concert with expressives in order to re-intepret social indexes as felt, embodied experiences (rheme) while also juxtaposing these experiences with elements in the immediately perceptible material world (dicent). The article also addresses issues of ethics, agency, and materiality entailed by multimodal expressive depiction.