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Part of
Iconicity: East meets West
Edited by Masako K. Hiraga, William J. Herlofsky, Kazuko Shinohara and Kimi Akita
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 14] 2015
► pp. 125–141

Iconicity in the syntax and lexical semantics of sound-symbolic words in Japanese

This study offers a response to Akita (2013a) who proposes a relation between the lexical semantics of sound-symbolic words and their realizations in a syntactic structure, drawing on a universal lexical hierarchy termed the Lexical Iconicity Hierarchy (LIH). This study examines Akita’s proposal drawing on data from Japanese mimetics. It suggests the LIH-based proposal may be difficult to maintain in its current format on the basis of (i) a frequency count of mimetics entered in a mid-sized mimetic dictionary and (ii) the syntactic characteristics of phonomimes (e.g., bukubuku ‘bubbling’), working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar.
Published online: 12 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.14.07tor
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Sugahara, Takashi
2022. The correlation between meaning and verb formation in Japanese sound-symbolic words. In Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems [Iconicity in Language and Literature, 18], ► pp. 351 ff. DOI logo
AKITA, KIMI & TAKESHI USUKI
2016. A constructional account of the ‘optional’ quotative marking on Japanese mimetics. Journal of Linguistics 52:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo

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