Cross-linguistic comparison
of tactile expressives

Context: Expressives, commonly referred to as ideophones or mimetics, are an under-represented grammatical category of words that depict sensory information. Expressives focus on showing instead of telling and are often categorised based on the dominant modality they portray, such as vision, audition, etc. There have been relatively few cross-linguistic studies of expressives across the region's different language families.

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Objective: To compareexpressives that illustrate tactile perceptual experiences from four languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam) belonging to two different language families (Indo-Aryan and Dravidian). 

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Method: Drawing on published sources, we created a list of expressives that explain tactile perception of textures in these languages. Then, we interviewed a native speaker of each of these four languages to understand their meanings and the contexts in which they are used.