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In:Iconicity: East meets West
Edited by Masako K. Hiraga, William J. Herlofsky, Kazuko Shinohara and Kimi Akita
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 14] 2015
► pp. 109–123

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What’s in a mimetic?

On the dynamicity of its iconic stem

 | Kyoto Sangyo University
ORCiD logo with link | Osaka University
Published online: 12 February 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.14.06usu
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 and semantic realizations. The discussion on the impossible uses of mimetics, such as intrinsically static adjectival expressions and object-oriented depictives, particularly clarifies the limits of the traditional root-based analysis of mimetic morphology and sets the basis for its theoretical treatment.
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Kwon, Nahyun & Shaoyun Yu
2018. Experimental evidence for the productivity of total reduplication in Japanese ideophones and ordinary vocabulary. Language Sciences 66 ► pp. 166 ff. DOI logo
Akita, Kimi
2017. The linguistic integration of Japanese ideophones and its typological implications. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62:2 ► pp. 314 ff. DOI logo
Akita, Kimi
2020. Modality-specificity of iconicity. In Operationalizing Iconicity [Iconicity in Language and Literature, 17], ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Mattes, Veronika
2017. Iconicity in the lexicon. Studies in Language 41:4 ► pp. 813 ff. DOI logo

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