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Part of
The Language of Food in Japanese: Cognitive perspectives and beyond
Edited by Kiyoko Toratani
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 25] 2022
► pp. 111–132

Chapter 4
Innovative binomial adjectives in Japanese food descriptions and beyond

| Nagoya University
| Nanzan University
Over the past two decades, the casual register of Japanese has developed a new class of binomial adjectives, such as fuwa-toro ‘fluffy and creamy’ and gū-kawa ‘overwhelmingly cute’. These terms are particularly common in creative, nuanced descriptions of food, fashion, and personality. This paper identifies four general constraints on the element ordering of these binomial adjectives that apply to different parts of the morphological network. Similar to mimetic (ideophonic) words, these adjectives are immediate to specific situations or sensory experiences and help us to express subjective, multimodal impressions that are otherwise inexpressible.
Keywords: Construction Morphology, hierarchical lexicon, iconicity, ideophones, immediacy, irreversibility, linguistic freezes, mimetics, morphology, neologisms
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on binomial freezes
  • 3.Mimetic-like properties of IBAs
  • 4.Semantic classification of IBAs
  • 5.IBAs as linguistic freezes
    • 5.1Irreversibility of IBAs
    • 5.2Constraints on the element order of IBAs
    • 5.3Morphological network of IBAs
  • 6.Immediate semantics of IBAs
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 9 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.25.04aki
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