Morphology in Gengbe and Yoruba ideophones

Ideophones depict events and states, filling the cracks between linguistic iconicity and arbitrariness. More than extemporaneous sound effects, ideophones are words, stored in the mental lexicons of speakers, and as such, despite their often exceptional properties, ideophones behave very much like other words, especially in their derivational morphology -- word formation that happens in the lexicon. To highlight the similarities in morphological phenomena between ideophones and other words in the lexicon, we consider compounding, reduplication, and tone in the derivational morphology of Gengbe and Yoruba. In these and other West African languages, often used as examples of isolating languages, we take this opportunity to highlight morphological processes where we find them, revealing complexity in the word formation patterns of ideophones and in the morphology of isolating languages.