Part of
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. WhitmanEdited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 97–122
Augmentatives and diminutives have never been recognized as such in grammars of Japanese though they constitute well-recognized classes in many languages, under the rubric of evaluative morphology. This study puts forward a view that the Japanese augmentatives and diminutives are found predominantly in the mimetic vocabulary, and especially as autosegmental subphonemic morphemes, thus escaping recognitions as such, in otherwise segmental agglutinative morphology of Japanese.