LSJapL 06: Japanese Ideophones

Japanese Ideophones

Noriko Katsuki-Pestemer
University of Trier

Japanese has a large number of lexical items which express sounds of animate and inanimate referents (onomatopoeiae), and those which express the manner of actions/events, properties of various referents, and human emotions (mimetics). The author employs the general term ideophones for these two types of word, i.e. onomatopoeiae and mimetics, as they share the same or similar linguistic characteristics. The book is divided into two parts: a short introduction to and the lexicon of Japanese ideophones.

The introduction gives the reader a brief overview of the linguistic features of Japanese ideophones in phonology (basic phonological items for the formation of ideophones and their phonosemantic features), morphology (word formation of ideophones), syntax (grammatical functions and colligation) and semantics (polysemy, referent marking, collocation, emotivity, visuality, and semantic fields of Japanese ideophones). The second part of the book, i.e. the lexicon, is a collection of Japanese ideophones used in Japanese newspapers, television news broadcasting and other spoken and written media; it is also a collection of German expressions which can be translated using Japanese ideophones. The latter was collected primarily from German children's literature, a German tabloid (Bild) and a German weekly magazine (Der Spiegel).

The book contains altogether 1095 entries, and they consist of basic ideophonic lexical items and their variants. The main objective of the book is to obtain sufficient material for a ontrastive analysis of Japanese ideophones and their German counterparts. However, the lexicon can be of practical assistance to the German student of Japanese, or to the Japanese learner of German as a second language, as one encounters many ideophonic expressions in both spoken and written Japanese. The book might further be of interest to linguists who are interested in ideophones in general.

ISBN 9783862882687. LINCOM Studies in Japenese Linguistics 06. 231pp. 2012.