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Operationalizing Iconicity
Edited by Pamela Perniss, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 17] 2020
► pp. 57–74

Morphosyntactic integration of ideophones in Japanese and Korean

A corpus-based analysis of spoken and written discourse

| Nagoya University
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ideophones grammar in Japanese and Korean
    • 2.1Morphosyntax of Japanese ideophones
    • 2.2Morphosyntax of Korean ideophones
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Semantic types: Phonomimes vs. phenomimes
    • 4.2Text styles: Spoken vs. written discourse
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
  • Data sources
Published online: 13 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.17.04par
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