TY - JOUR
T1 - A wug-shaped curve in sound symbolism
T2 - The case of Japanese Pokémon names
AU - Kawahara, Shigeto
N1 - Funding Information:
* E-mail: KAWAHARA@ICL.KEIO.AC.JP. The paper would not have reached its current form without the help of the many people who commented on various incarnations of this project, asked insightful questions and/or offered analytical help and suggestions. They include Arto Anttila, Andries Coetzee, Christian DiCanio, Donna Erickson, Bruce Hayes, Hironori Katsuda, Laura McPherson, Jason Shaw, three anonymous Phonology reviewers, the associate editor and the editors, as well as the participants at Berkeley Phonology Discussion Group, the NINJAL prosody study group and the IERS workshop on the phonetics–phonology interface hosted by the International Christian University. Canaan Breiss deserves a special thanks for many conversations that we have had about almost all the issues discussed in this paper. I would like to thank Kero for hosting the current online experiment on his blog, which helped me to gather the data in a very efficient manner. This project is supported by the JSPS grants #17K13448 and #18H03579, as well as the NINJAL collaborative research project ‘Cross-linguistic studies of Japanese prosody and grammar’. Files used for analyses in the current paper are available as supplementary materials at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675720000202. All remaining errors are mine.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2020/8
Y1 - 2020/8
N2 - An experiment showed that Japanese speakers' judgement of Pokémons' evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls 'wug-shaped curves', a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.
AB - An experiment showed that Japanese speakers' judgement of Pokémons' evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls 'wug-shaped curves', a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0952675720000202
DO - 10.1017/S0952675720000202
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85097876578
SN - 0952-6757
VL - 37
SP - 383
EP - 418
JO - Phonology
JF - Phonology
IS - 3
ER -