Expressive Lexicography: Creating a Dictionary of Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area

In this paper we reflect upon the process of producing a dictionary of expressives in Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, in eastern India, by approximately 1,530,000 people. We explore some methodological challenges faced in the study of expressives, as well as approaches taken in this long-term study of Mundari, including elicitation, discussion, performance, text analysis and participant observation. The study of expressives is gaining momentum in the region, yet efforts to create dictionaries of this important class of words are still few. We argue that field-based, multidisciplinary studies that draw on the insights of native speakers on the use of expressives in society are critical in this endeavour. This is crucial because semantically, there is a great, inherent tension between the desire to capture the depth of an expressive’s complex meaning and the necessity of managing an inevitable process of standardization. The challenges and risks of ‘taming’ of expressive meaning require solid ethnographic grounding. Dictionaries of expressives will thus resemble encyclopedias in that they present a linguistic cosmology, with all the social relationships, ecological entanglements, moral statements and ethnic representations they embody.