Towards a semantic typological classification of motion ideophones

Motion ideophones are ubiquitous across languages. They expressively enact the way a motion event takes place. The main goal of this chapter is to offer a working proposal to classify motion ideophones from a semantic typological perspective. After a description of motion ideophones, the semantic grid for motion ideophones is presented. This consists of 7 first-level components plus 26 second-level and 121 third-level sub-components. The second part comprises two studies: a first-level analysis of 453 Basque motion ideophones and a fine-grained subcomponent analysis on a selection of 186 motion ideophones from 16 genetically and geographically different languages. The last section discusses the usefulness and applicability of this type of semantic typological classifications.