Over the past two decades, the casual register of Japanese has developed a new class of binomial adjectives, such as fuwa-toro ‘fluffy and creamy’ and gū-kawa ‘overwhelmingly cute’. These terms are particularly common in creative, nuanced descriptions of food, fashion, and personality. This… read more
The ‘iconicity ring model’ proposed in this chapter depicts a lexicon’s evolutionary path from genuine iconicity (termed ‘primary iconicity’) to arbitrariness to another type of iconicity (termed ‘emergent iconicity’) that emerges from linguistic systematicity. The model captures the… read more
Linguistic expressions of visual motion (e.g., look into the building) in ten languages are compared, based on a crosslinguistic production experiment. We examine how linguistic representations of visual motion are typologically akin to those of self- and caused motion events. The results… read more
Ideophones and direct quotations are “depictive” signs, or vivid re-enactments of what they signify. Pursuing the typology of linguistic depiction, the current study proposes a three-way classification of depiction marking strategies: framing, foregrounding, and backgrounding. While well-known… read more
This study examines the semantic variety and specificity of Japanese ideophones for spatial motion events to illustrate the modality-specificity of iconicity. As verbal icons, motion ideophones tend to depict dynamic (e.g., auditory, spatio-temporal) aspects of motion events. Suprasegmental… read more
This chapter delves into the typological discussion of “manner salience” (Slobin 2004, 2006) by means of a fine-grained examination of different kinds of manner expressions. Our two speech elicitation experiments revealed that English speakers are clearly more manner salient than Japanese in the… read more
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… read more
The morphosyntax of manner expressions has attracted less attention than that of path expressions in the framing typology. Drawing primarily on experimental and quantitative data in Japanese and English, we propose and examine three parameters in the complex typology of manner expressions. It is… read more
This chapter examines the nature of linguistic expressions of Deixis, which is often coded somewhat differently from other components of Path. It is argued that deictic verbs like come are not merely spatial in meaning but also functional. Results of a video-based experiment in English, Japanese,… read more
This paper explores the fundamental semantic and syntactic properties of Japanese mimetic lexemes as iconic signs that depict various eventualities by means of linguistic sound. We argue how the two central features of mimetics – stem-based morphology and dynamicity – restrict their morphosyntactic… read more
This paper proposes an integrated account of the formal and functional non-uniformity exhibited by sound-symbolic words based on a hierarchy of lexical iconicity (i.e., iconicity of words). It is argued that the more iconic a vocalized sign is, the less strongly it is constrained by the linguistic… read more
Theoretically as well as empirically, paraphrase is a pivotal concept in many academic and nonacademic fields. And yet, its investigation has made very slow progress, due mainly to the lack of a framework that is versatile enough to deal with the nebulous nature of paraphrase in use. This paper… read more
Most studies have tried to define inherently iconic words (mimetics, ideophones) in terms of their formal features but phonosemantic peculiarity, assumed without empirical consideration, is not evidently distinct from regular sound symbolism. Two experiments were conducted to probe the… read more
Theoretically as well as empirically, paraphrase is a pivotal concept in many academic and nonacademic fields. And yet, its investigation has made very slow progress, due mainly to the lack of a framework that is versatile enough to deal with the nebulous nature of paraphrase in use. This paper… read more