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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:2 (2021) ► pp.278–302

Mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language’

ORCID logo | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

This article explores grammatical and functional properties of mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language.’ In the standard variety, the suffix -mi nominalizes an adjective stem: fuka-mi ‘deep-nmlz’ (= ‘profoundness’). This suffix is also used in youth language, but its productivity has expanded considerably. To mention a few, -mi applies to not only an adjective (stem) but also a verb, a noun, a pronoun, their phrasal counterparts, and even an onomatopoeia. We claim that these properties of -mi are flexibly captured in the framework of nominalization recently proposed by Masayoshi Shibatani. This framework leads us to describe further unique properties of mi-nominalization, such as “double nominalization” where an already-nominalized form undergoes a further nominalization process and the “sentential use” of a nominalized structure where a nominalized element functions as a sentence, with which an illocutionary speech act is performed.

Keywords: nonstandard variety, Twitter , lexical nominalization, grammatical nominalization, sentential use, speech act
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
  • 3.Framework
    • 3.1Lexical nominalization
    • 3.2Grammatical nominalization
    • 3.3Residual issues
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1V-based nominalization
      • 4.1.1Adjective (stem)
      • 4.1.2Verb
    • 4.2N-based nominalization
    • 4.3Further issues
  • 5.Implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 10 November 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20006.ser
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