The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics

Mimetic words, also known as ‘sound-symbolic words’, ‘ideophones’ or ‘onomatopoeia’, constitute an important subset of the Japanese lexicon as well as that of other Asian languages and sub-Saharan African languages. It plays a central role in Japanese grammar and feature in children’s early utterances. Through accounts of mimetics from the perspectives of morpho-syntax, semantics, language development and translation of mimetic words, this book aims to bridge the gap between the research on Japanese mimetics and its availability to an international audience, and provides a better understanding of grammatical and structural aspects of sound-symbolic words from a Japanese perspective.