How do we categorize known and unknown ideophones?
A case study of Japanese reduplicated ideophones
Ryoko Uno1, Kanako Komiya1 & Masayuki Asahara2
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, ryokouno@cc.tuat.ac.jp, kkomiya@go.tuat.ac.jp
2
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, masayu-a@ninjal.ac.jp

1

Keywords: ideophones, neologism, corpus, Japanese
Ideophones are defined as “marked words depictive of sensory imagery found in many of theworld’s languages” (Dingemanse 2012). Because of their depictive function or iconicity, ideophones aretaken as a clue to explore linguistic evolution by many, most notably Haiman(2018). To judge whether
a word is iconic, the similarity between its meaning and the image aroused by its form is evaluated. Thismeans that we must know the meaning associated with the form before the judgment. Then, is it possible
to find ideophones from unknown words (i.e., just by forms)? To determine how speakers detect
ideophones from candidate forms, we conducted a questionnaire survey and analyzed the data.
Our target language was Japanese, which is known to be rich in ideophones (Hamano 1998). Since
two repeated moras ((C 1)V1(C2)V2–(C1)V1(C2)V2), such as kirakira (shiny), is the most common form ofJapanese ideophone, we extracted all the reduplicated two moras from the NINJAL Web JapaneseCorpus (Asahara et al. 2014), 844 words in total.
In the survey, we asked participants the following questions for each word: (1) Do you know thisword? (2) Do you think it is an ideophone? (3) Can you imagine the sense it expresses? (4) Do you think
it expresses a sound or a voice? (5) Do you think it expresses a condition or an emotion? There were674 participants on Yahoo! Japan Crowdsourcing, and each participant was allowed to answer
questions on 10 words at most. The participants answered by rating on a scale of 0–2 for question (1)and 0–5 for questions (2)–(5).
First, we performed a correlation analysis to determine whether the speaker sees ideophones as
expressing sensory imagery according to the linguistic definition. The average ratings for ideophones(2) and sensory imagery (3) for all 844 types were positively correlated (0.89, p<0.05). Moreover, thispositive correlation was significant (0.69, p<0.05) even for the words that >75% of speakers did notknow. Second, we analyzed the rating for ideophones (2) using factors (1) and (3)–(5) using linear
regression. The results show that while the familiarity factor (1) is not correlated for the rating for
ideophones, factors (3)–(5) are positively correlated (p<0.05).
Our results show that Japanese speakers see ideophones as words that express sensory imagery
regardless of their iconicity. We also found that speakers could categorize words that they had neverseen before as ideophones. For example, while both had extremely low familiarity rates, “afuafu” wasoften categorized as an ideophone but not “kafukafu” despite the similarity in form.
Schmid(2008) proposed three stages of the establishment of new words: creation, consolidation,and establishing. Our results are the first step toward showing how a newly created ideophone can beshared by others and open the possibility of proceeding from the first to the second stage ofestablishment. As a next step, we plan to investigate the conditions speakers use to distinguish between
ideophones and non-ideophones among unknown words.

References
Asahara, Masayuki, Maekawa, Kikuo, Imada, Mizuho, Kato, Sachi & Konishi, Hikari. 2014. Archivingand analysing techniques of the ultra-large-scale web-based corpus project of NINJAL, Japan.
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Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language andLinguistics Compass 6(10). 654-672.
Haiman, John. 2018. Ideophones and the evolution of language. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Hamano, Shoko. 1998. The sound-symbolic system of Japanese. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2008. New words in the mind: Concept-formation and entrenchment ofneologisms. Anglia 126. 1-36.