出版社：Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic
摘要：In the vocabulary of sound symbolism of Present-day Japanese, there are a great many examples of word-pairs such as kira-kira : gira-gira , both of which denote substantially the same thing (or event), but connote differently. The denotata of these two are the same sense-impression we obtain from looking at some light-giving object e. g. the sun, and the connotatum of the former is, broadly speaking, our appreciation of the experience, whereas that of the latter seems to be a certain sense of displeasure, if not of disgust. Here we find our emotive attitude towards the event reflected faithfully in a contrastive sound pair; k : g , thus the expressive value of sounds peculiar to Japanese is exploited to the full. The kind of naturalistic connection here illustrated between the meaning of a word and its sound, however, does not normally exist outside the sphere of onomatopoeia in a wide sense of the term. But the author points out in this article that there are a number of word-pairs, mostly of colloquial usage, which, having nothing to do with onomatopoeia, can be regarded in their semantic structure as close parallels to the example above cited. A case in point is the pair; tori : dori . Now tori here means a bird or a chicken looked on as an edible thing, and dori stands for the inedible part, i. e. lungs and intestines, of a bird. One more example; hure: bure. A bure is trembling in general. A bure for a trembling of the hand as one takes pictures. To these are found corresponding verbs as well. Discussing these and other similar pairs in some detail, the author concludes that the functioning of morphophonemic contrasts of this kind are of two levels. As for denotative meaning, the contrast t: d etc. has an associative function. As for connotative meaning the same contrast has a dissociative , i. e. distinctive function.
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