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Mimetic words, also known as ‘sound-symbolic words’, ‘ideophones’ or more popularly as ‘onomatopoeia’, constitute an important subset of the Japanese lexicon; we find them as well in the lexicons of other Asian languages and sub-Saharan African languages. Mimetics play a central role in Japanese grammar and feature in children’s early utterances. However, this class of words is not considered as important in English and other European languages. This book aims to bridge the gap between the extensive research on Japanese mimetics and its availability to an international audience, and also to provide a better understanding of grammatical and structural aspects of sound-symbolic words from a Japanese perspective. Through the accounts of mimetics from the perspectives of morpho-syntax, semantics, language development and translation of mimetic words, linguists and students alike would find this book particularly valuable.
The lexicon of Japanese contains a large number of conventional mimetic words which vividly depict sounds, manners of action, states of mind etc. These words are notable for their distinctive syntactic properties, for the strikingly patterned way in which they exploit sound-symbolic correspondences, and for the copiousness of their use in conversation as well as in many written registers of Japanese. This dictionary is a comprehensive resource for linguists, language teachers, translators, and others who require detailed information about this important sector of the Japanese vocabulary. Examples created by the editors are accompanied by thousands of contextualized, referenced examples from published sources to illustrate the alternative meanings of each mimetic form. All examples appear in Japanese orthography, in romanization, and in English translation. Concise information is provided concerning the varieties of syntactic usage appropriate for each mimetic. An extensive English index facilitates comparison of English and Japanese vocabulary.
This volume presents a comprehensive survey of the lexicon and word formation processes in contemporary Japanese, with particular emphasis on their typologically characteristic features and their interactions with syntax and semantics. Through contacts with a variety of languages over more than two thousand years of history, Japanese has developed a complex vocabulary system that is composed of four lexical strata: (i) native Japanese, (ii) mimetic, (iii) Sino-Japanese, and (iv) foreign (especially English). This hybrid composition of the lexicon, coupled with the agglutinative character of the language by which morphology is closely associated with syntax, gives rise to theoretically intriguing interactions with word formation processes that are not easily found with inflectional, isolate, or polysynthetic types of languages.
This innovative and original volume brings together studies that apply cognitive and functional linguistics to the study of the L2 acquisition of Japanese. With each article grounded on the usage-based model and/or conceptual notions such as foregrounding and subjectivity, the volume sheds light on how cognitive and functional linguistics can help us understand aspects of Japanese acquisition that have been neglected by traditionalists.
Studies of Japanese syntax have played a central role in the long history of Japanese linguistics spanning more than 250 years in Japan and abroad. More recently, Japanese has been among the languages most intensely studied within modern linguistic theories such as Generative Grammar and Cognitive/Functional Linguistics over the past fifty years. This volume presents a comprehensive survey of Japanese syntax from these three research strands, namely studies based on the traditional research methods developed in Japan, those from broader functional perspectives, and those couched in the generative linguistics framework. The twenty-four studies contained in this volume are characterized by a d...
This book is a collection of eight articles by leading scholars investigating of the acquisition of English by native speakers of Japanese. It deals with a wide range of topics from the acquisiton of VP structures to functional categories and presents new empirical data. The studies all contribute to our understanding of these topics, and they are of current interest to researchers working on Second Language Acquisition.
This book presents and comments on four short works of Japanese literature by prominent writers of the early twentieth century, including Natsume Sōseki and Miyazawa Kenji. These are their first-ever published English translations. The book is designed to be used as a textbook for the translation of modern Japanese literature—another first. Each chapter introduces the writer and his work, presents the original Japanese text in its entirety, and encourages students with advanced Japanese to make their own translation of it, before reading the author’s translation that follows. The detailed commentary section in each chapter focuses on two stylistic issues that characterise the source text, and how the target text—the translation—has dealt with them, before the chapter concludes with questions for further discussion and analysis.
Food, Language, and Society: Communication in Japanese Foodways examines the language of food in Japanese through the lens of cognitive science and cultural studies to explore intriguing ways in which language, food, and culture interact in the fabric of Japanese society. The questions of how, where, and by whom food and food experiences are described provide abundant opportunities for investigating relationships between language and culture from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Linguistic analysis of the language of food enables us to understand cognitive information that motivates and influences people’s rhetorical choices on foodways. Detailed discussions reveal that loanwords, mimetics...
This book investigates the notion of subjectivity from a pragmatic point of view. There have been attempts to reduce the notion of the speaker or subjectivity as a syntactic category, or to seek an explanation for it in semantic terms. However, in order to understand the vast range of subjectivity phenomena, it is more fruitful to examine how the attributes and the experience of the real speaker affect language. The volume provides a theoretical/methodological basis for the study of various aspects of language and discourse and applies these specifically to Japanese spoken discourse, for which the data are added in an appendix.
One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some higher potential called the "mind" and, more particularly, the intertwining of body and mind, which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in length. However, the interaction between culture, body and language has not received the due attention that it deserves. Naturally, any serious exploration of the interface between body, language and culture would require an analytical tool that would capture the ways in which different cultural groups conceptualize their feelings, thinking, and other experiences in relation to body and language. A well-establishe...