Ideophonic pairing as a pan-igbo phenomenon

The phenomenon of ideophonic pairing in Igbo, first identified in Uchechukwu (2007), is a form of doubling or reduplication of linguistic structures that involves the forming of an ideophonic pair, IDEO1IDEO2, either from an existing high tone ideophone or from a lexical item with a mixture of high and low tones. The output is IDEO [HIGH] IDEO [LOW] whereby the first component has entirely high tones while the second component has entirely low tones. Also, the second component does not exist as an independent lexical item in the language; instead, the resultant pair is always systematically used together to express a contrastive, rhythmic schema that is meaningful in the language. This paper points to the possibility of this phenomenon being a pan-Igbo phenomenon.