Towards a Comprehensive and Quantitative Data Analysis of Japanese Ideophones

抄録

Ideophones (giongo/gitaigo) are sound-symbolic or iconic words found in many languages. They have been attracting increasing attention in the fields of linguistics, psychology, and more broadly, cognitive science. Japanese ideophones have been extensively studied due to their highly conventionalized sound symbolic system; however, research often relies on native speaker linguists’ introspection, particularly concerning the form-meaning correlation. This study provides an automatic analysis of Japanese ideophones using full dictionary entries with Python3 and its library Polas. Additionally, this study offers an initial analysis using the automatically generated comprehensive data, with a special focus on their form-meaning correspondences, particularly whether they refer to sound. The study not only reduces researchers’ workload, but also enables more objective, detailed, and comprehensive analysis of sound symbolism in Japanese ideophones and other languages, facilitating large-scale cross-linguistic comparisons.