Iconicity in the syntax and lexical semantics of sound symbolic words in Japanese
This study offers a response to Akita (2013a) who proposes a relation between the lexical semantics of sound symbolic words and their realizations in a syntactic structure, drawing on a universal lexical hierarchy termed the Lexical Iconicity Hierarchy (LIH) This study examines Akita's proposal drawing on data from Japanese mimetics. It suggests the LIH based proposal may be difficult to maintain in its current format on the basis of (i) a frequency count of mimetics entered in a mid sized mimetic dictionary and (ii) the syntactic characteristics of phonomimes (e.g. bukubuku 'bubbling' working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar.