Categories
The sound-symbolic words of Japanese can be classified into three main categories (Akita 2009):
- Phonomime or onomatopoeia (擬声語 giseigo or 擬音語 giongo)
- words that mimic actual sounds. Giseigo refers to sounds made by living things, while Giongo refers to sounds made by inanimate objects.
- Phenomime (擬態語 gitaigo)
- words that depict non-auditory senses.
- Psychomime (also called 擬態語 gitaigo or 擬情語 gijōgo)
- words that depict psychological states or bodily feelings.
In Japanese grammar, sound symbolic words function as adverbs. Just like ideophones in many other languages, they are often introduced by a quotative complementizer と (to) (Kita 1997:384). Most sound symbolic words can be applied to only a handful of verbs or adjectives. In the examples below, the classified verb or adjective is placed in square brackets.
| Sound Symbolism | Meaning |
|---|---|
| じろじろ(と) jirojiro (to) |
intently (= stare) |
| きらきら(と) kirakira (to) |
sparklingly |
| ぎらぎら(と) giragira (to) |
dazzlingly |
| どきどき doki doki |
with a throbbing heart |
| ぐずぐず guzu guzu |
procrastinating or dawdling (suru not optional) |
| しいんと shiin to |
quiet (suru not optional) |
| ぴんぴん pinpin |
lively (shite iru not optional) |
| よぼよぼに yoboyobo ni |
wobbly-legged (from age)¹ |
- に (ni) instead of と (to) is used for なる (naru = become)
Read more about this topic: Japanese Sound Symbolism
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of “trashy,” sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the “cliché” in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)