ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to facilitate poor interaction by introducing and translating the major findings about the form and meaning of Japanese mimetics and reinterpreting them from a general, cross-linguistic perspective. It provides the prototypicality of Japanese mimetics as ideophones, grammatical constructions available for mimetics, and the aspectual semantics of mimetic morpho-phonology. The chapter outlines the major issues and finds in the grammatical and functional investigations of Japanese mimetics, focusing on their ideophonicity, construction, and aspectuality. Japanese mimetics share many, but not all, formal and functional properties with ideophones from other languages. Japanese mimetics are most frequent in informal conversation, creative literary text, and child-directed speech, but also common in rather formal conversation, including in meetings of the Diet. As is true for ideophones in many other languages, Japanese mimetics are often accompanied by some paralinguistic features, such as expressive prosody and iconic gesture. Japanese mimetics are realized in several morpho-syntactic constructions.
