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Part of
Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives
Edited by Kimi Akita and Prashant Pardeshi
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 16] 2019
► pp. 229–248

Chapter 9
Mimetics, gaze, and facial expression in a multimodal corpus of Japanese

| Nagoya University
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 nature. However, a weak correlation with morphosyntax is suggested for the speaker’s gaze redirected away from the hearer, which is considered a signal of ‘depictive’ signification prototypical mimetics illustrate.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
    • 2.1Paralinguistic/nonverbal features of ideophones
    • 2.2Facial expression and speaker gaze
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.16.10aki
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