Edited by Pamela Perniss, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 17] 2020
► pp. 57–74
This study explores how the morphosyntactic integration of ideophones differs between two registers of two ideophone-rich languages, Japanese and Korean. Previous studies have demonstrated that the iconicity and expressive power of ideophones in spoken language are inversely correlated with their degree of grammatical integration. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written Japanese and Korean, this paper argues that the morphosyntactic integration of ideophones as measured by their verbalizability is greater (i) in non-auditory domains than in the auditory domain, (ii) in spoken than written discourse, and (iii) in Korean than in Japanese.