The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Unimodal and Cross-Modal Iconicity in Japanese Ideophones: A cognitive-semiotic approach

På svenska

Author

  • Nils Paulsson

Summary, in English

Drawing on concepts from cognitive semiotics and phenomenology, this thesis investigates how Japanese ideophones are perceived by non-speakers of Japanese, aiming to clarify key concepts such as iconicity, cross-modality/unimodality and the ultimately the nature of language as a semiotic system. Three research questions guided the study: (1) What is the relation between primary and secondary iconicity in the perception and interpretation of ideophones? (2) Which sensory modalities are perceived as more iconic? (3) To what extent does Japanese orthography influence perceptions of iconicity? An online experiment was conducted with non-Japanese participants using two tasks: (a) a two-alternative forced-choice Choosing Task, designed to elicit pre-reflective judgments of ideophone-meaning correspondences, and (b) an iconicity Rating Task, eliciting reflective evaluations of iconicity. The results show that participants “guessed” meanings above chance across modalities, confirming the roles of primary iconicity: being able to establish the meaning of unknown words (signs) beyond chance. Accuracy in the Choosing Task was highest for unimodal auditory ideophones, followed by cross-modal visual ideophones, while interoceptive items were less transparent. Interestingly, Rating Task diverged from this, suggesting that reflective judgments of vividness and expressivity do not align directly with pre-reflective ratings of iconicity. Orthographic manipulations (hiragana vs. katakana) produced no significant effects. These findings contribute to the debate on iconicity in language by demonstrating that pre-reflective and reflective levels of sign interpretation do not necessarily coincide, supporting a cognitive-semiotic account where primary and secondary iconicity operate in tandem, and pre-reflective judgements of often have higher validity than introspective ones. The study advances understanding of how iconicity functions in ideophones in Japanese, and more generally, thus clarifying the nature of language as a highly structured and conventional but non-arbitrary semiotic system.

Department/s

Publishing year

2025

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Master's degree (two years)

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Keywords

  • Japanese ideophones
  • cross-modal iconicity
  • sensory modality
  • orthography
  • sound symbolism
  • cognitive semiotics

Supervisor

  • Jordan Zlatev