Kimi Akita

Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for t

Ideophones, also termed <italic>mimetics</italic> or <italic>expressives</italic>, are marked words that depict sensory imagery. They are found in many of the world’s languages, and sizable lexical classes of ideophones are particularly well-documented in the languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Ideophones are not limited to onomatopoeia like <italic>meow</italic> and <italic>smack</italic> but cover a wide range of sensory domains, such as manner of motion (e.g., <italic>plisti plasta</

This paper proposes an integrated account of the formal and functional non-uniformity exhibited by sound-symbolic words based on a hierarchy of lexical iconicity (i.e., iconicity of words). It is argued that the more iconic a vocalized sign is, the less strongly it is constrained by the linguistic system. This crosslinguistic generalization is instantiated by the lexical availability, morphophonology, syntax, semantics, and acquisition of sound-symbolic words.

Most studies have tried to define inherently iconic words (mimetics, ideophones) in terms of their formal features but phonosemantic peculiarity, assumed without empirical consideration, is not evidently distinct from regular sound symbolism. Two experiments were conducted to probe the phonosemantic specificity of iconic words. Experiment 1 asked twenty native Japanese speakers to rate 140 novel words, half of which had a shape typical of Japanese iconic words: no systematic difference in conson

Abstract The ‘iconicity ring model’ proposed in this chapter depicts a lexicon’s evolutionary path from genuine iconicity (termed ‘primary iconicity’) to arbitrariness to another type of iconicity (termed ‘emergent iconicity’) that emerges from linguistic systematicity. The model captures the universality and language-specificity of sound symbolism and its role in lexical acquisition. Iconicity loss in ideophones illustrates the shift from primary iconicity to arbitrariness, whereas ideophonizat

Mimetic/ideophonic utterances are often accompanied by expressive prosody and iconic gesture. This chapter reports the speaker’s facial expression and eye contact with the hearer as two more possible nonverbal correlates of mimetics on the basis of a multimodal corpus of Japanese interviews. It is shown that, unlike prosody and gesture, these somewhat frequent facial behaviors are not correlated with the morphosyntactic features of mimetics because of their primarily affective and interactional

This article proposes three constraints on the complex polysemy patterns of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeic forms for thirty types of sounds were collected from Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and English, and examined in terms of their semantic extensibility and extension types. It was found that 1) Chinese onomatopoeia is generally resistant to semantic extension, 2) onomatopoeic forms for voice in Japanese and Korean are less likely to be polysemous than those for noise, many of which show met

Abstract This article presents empirical evidence of the high referential specificity of sound-symbolic words, based on a FrameNet-aided analysis of collocational data of Japanese mimetics. The definition of mimetics, particularly their semantic definition, has been crosslinguistically the most challenging problem in the literature, and different researchers have used different adjectives (most notably, “vivid,” since Doke 1935) to describe their semantic peculiarity. The present study approache

This paper proposes a constructional account of the longstanding issue of the optional quotative to -marking on manner-adverbial mimetics (or ideophones) in Japanese. We argue that this optionality comes from the availability of two morphological constructions – the bare-mimetic predicate construction and the quotative-adverbial construction – to a set of mimetics. On the one hand, the bare-mimetic predicate construction incorporates previously identified phonological, syntactic, and semantic co

This paper claims that psychological sound-symbolic words (or psych-mimetics; e.g., kat (to) ‘angry’, wakuwaku ‘exhilarated’) in Japanese and predicates they form have embodied semantic characteristics. Previous studies have assumed that psych-mimetics form one category. However, the possibility of cooccurrence with locus NPs enables a clear distinction among them. Psych-mimetics that optionally take a locus NP (termed “somatopsych-mimetics”) refer to bodily sensation and those that cannot take

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary correspondence between sound and meaning. The majority of studies on sound symbolism have focused on consonants and vowels, and the sound-symbolic properties of suprasegmentals, particularly phonation types, have been largely neglected. This study examines the size and shape symbolism of four phonation types: modal and creaky voices, falsetto, and whisper. Japanese speakers heard 12 novel words (e.g., /íbi/, /ápa/) pronounced with the four types of phonation an

Abstract Ideophones and direct quotations are “depictive” signs, or vivid re-enactments of what they signify. Pursuing the typology of linguistic depiction, the current study proposes a three-way classification of depiction marking strategies: framing, foregrounding, and backgrounding. While well-known formal characteristics of ideophones, such as prosodic prominence and quotative constructions, illustrate framing and foregrounding, this paper discusses low-pitched quotative indexes in Japanese

Abstract The morphosyntax of manner expressions has attracted less attention than that of path expressions in the framing typology. Drawing primarily on experimental and quantitative data in Japanese and English, we propose and examine three parameters in the complex typology of manner expressions. It is argued that coarse-grained, event-inherent manners that the speaker does not intend to stress (e.g. normal running) are more likely to be realized in tight morphosyntactic constructions headed b