6 February 2019

Semantic representation of Japanese sound symbolic words: Implications for language development and evolution

Sotaro Kita

Japanese is known for a large inventory of mimetics (e.g., Hamano, 1998, Ono, 2008), equivalent to “expressives” and “ideophones” in studies on other language families (Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz, 2001), which all have motivated (iconic) form-meaning relationships. First, I will discuss evidence that semantic representation of mimetics is qualitatively different from that of ordinary words (Kita, 1997). More specifically, semantic representation of mimetics is “imgastic” (as opposed to propositional). One piece of evidence comes from the fact that when Japanese speakers produce mimetics in narrative, they are highly likely to also produce a co-expressive iconic gesture at the same time. Iconic gestures depict action, motion and shape. It has been suggested that such iconic gesture reflect imagery evoked at the moment of speaking (McNeill, 1992). The frequent co-occurrence of mimetics and iconic gestures suggest that they share underlying imagistic representation.

Second, though mimetics can express highly detailed concepts in a broad range of domains (e.g., Ono, 2007), the type of semantic information they can denote is restricted (Kita, 2008). For example, there are no mimitics that refer to events that happen in a particular place or time. This contrasts with ordinary words (e.g., kawa-asobi, river-play, “playing in a river”, yo-wamwari, ‘night watch”). This may indicate that mimetics specialize in expressing “hear-and-now” experiences.

The iconic representation of “hear-and-now” experiences in mimetics facilitates in language learning in children. Japanese children learn novel mimetic verbs (e.g., batobato-suru, “do batobato”) better when they are sound symbolically related to the referent (Imai, Kita, Nagumo & Okada, 2008). Furthermore, the same effect was found for English-speaking children in the UK (Kantarzis, Imai & Kita, 2011). Mimetics may help children zero-in on the referent action in a complex scene because mimetics guide children to focus on “hear-and-now” experience that iconically matches the word form (Imai & Kita, 2014).

The nature of semantic representation of mimetics has implications for theories of language evolution (Kita, 2008). Mimetics can be seen as a “fossil” of an ancient mode of communication, where iconic representation of hear-and-now experiences helped our ancestors build a shared lexicon more efficiently.

References

Hamano S. 1998 The sound-symbolic system of Japanese. Stanford, CA: CSLI and Kuroshio.

Imai M, Kita S, Nagumo M, Okada H. 2008 Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition 109, 54 – 65. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015)

Imai M, Kita S. 2014 The sound symbolism bootrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369, 20130298, (doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0298).

Kantartzis K, Imai M, Kita S. 2011 Japanese sound- symbolism facilitates word learning in English- speaking children. Cognitive Science. 35, 575 – 586. (doi:10. 1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01169.x)

Kita S. 1997 Two-dimensional semantic analysis of Japanese mimetics. Linguistics 35, 379 – 415. (doi:10.1515/ling.1997.35.2.379)

Kita S. 2008 World-view of protolanguage speakers as inferred from semantics of sound symbolic words: a case of Japanese mimetics. In Origins of language (ed. N Masataka), pp. 25 – 38. Tokyo, Japan: Springer.

McNeill, D. 1992 Hand and mind. Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Ono M (ed.). 2007 Nihongo onomatope jiten (Japanese Mimetics Dictionary). Tokyo, Japan: Shogakkan.

Voeltz FKE, Kilian-Hatz C (eds.) 2001 Ideophones. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.