Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye

I am a member of the Research Training Group 2636: “Form-meaning mismatches” and a member of the Sign Lab in Göttingen since 2024. I had my Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Linguistics and Master’s degree in Linguistics both at the University of Ghana. My Master’s thesis which was supervised by Reginald Akuoko Duah, Yvonne Agbetsoamedo and Cornelia Ebert, broadly explored the semantics of ideophones in Ga (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana) and further investigated their at-issue status in the language.

I am now very interested in iconicity, more specifically, ideophones in spoken languages and more recently, in sign languages. I have a special interest in exploring the interaction between ideophones and other iconic enrichments such as gestures. My doctoral project which is supervised by Markus Steinbach, Cornelia Ebert and Hedde Zeijlstra, broadly covers ideophones and co-speech gestures in Ga with special focus on this interaction across different sensory domains. Since ideophones are used in many spoken languages, I also find it interesting to later compare particularly, the (conventionalized) ideophone-accompanying gestures in Ga to ideophone-like expressions in various sign languages.