Kimi Akita

An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese

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 this inverse relation in ten spoken languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones – vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives – across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures, and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

A constructional account of the ‘optional’ quotative marking on Japanese mimetics

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 conditions of the bare realization of mimetics. This construction is instantiated by bare mimetics (e.g. pyokopyoko ‘jumping around quickly’) in combination with their typical host predicates (e.g. hane- ‘jump’), and they behave as loose complex predicates with more or less abstract meanings. As with ‘say’- and ‘do’-verbs, these complex predicates involve quasi-incorporation, which is a constructional strategy for the morphosyntactic integration of mimetics into sentence structures. On the other hand, the quotative-adverbial construction introduces mimetics to sentences with a minimal loss of their imitative semiotics. This fundamental function is consistent with the wide distribution of quotative-marked mimetics.

An embodied semantic analysis of psychological mimetics in Japanese

Abstract 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 one (termed “visuopsych-mimetics”) refer to observable activity or behavior in addition to emotion. Several sorts of reinforcement are given to this dichotomy. First, not a few somato- and visuopsych-mimetics can be synchronically or diachronically analyzed as being derived from mimetics for bodily sensation and mimetics of vision, respectively. Second, some morphosyntactic properties of mimetic psych-verbs, including their morphology and participation in two controllability-related constructions, support the distinctive statuses of somato- and visuopsych-mimetics. Third, an experiment asking Japanese speakers to draw pictures for psych-mimetics provided further evidence for the visual basis of visuopsych-mimetics. Thus, like other psychological/perceptual expressions, psych-mimetics represent emotion by referring to particular physical experiences associated with or similar to it. Consequently, this study is dually significant. It contributes to the embodiment theory and points out the regularity of this apparently peculiar word class.