A preponderance of ideophones in Kiksht and related languages has long been
acknowledged, though they have gone by other names: “verbal particles” (Dyk 1933),
“attribute complements” (Boas 1904), and “invariable particles accompanied by
auxiliary verbs” (Sapir 1907). Starting in the middle of the 20th century, a substantial
amount of scholarly work has been published about Kiksht and other languages of the
Chinookan family. Yet these publications tended not to feature ideophones explicitly,
mirroring a broader trend in linguistics quite pervasive at the time. A recent wave of
linguistic scholarship, however, has worked to challenge “a recurrent narrative of
marginalization” (Dingemanse 2018) of ideophones, positioning them more toward the
center of linguistic theory. Connecting to this emerging comparative research on
ideophones, in this talk I highlight results from three studies of Kiksht ideophones,
focusing especially on issues related to categoryhood, valency, and transitivity. And,
recognizing the importance of language work that is relational (Leonard 2023) and
centers community needs, I consider how work with Kiksht ideophones might support
Kiksht language teaching.