Языки стран Дальнего Востока, Юго-Восточной Азии и Западной Африки

33 Stella T. Zhivkova | Sound Symbolism of Japanese Onomatopoeia as a Determining Factor... Mimetic words are “verbal icons” for sounds and modes and consider them to be of paramount importance for the imagery and expressiveness found in Japanese language and art and Japanese culture as a whole.The examples serve to reveal the traces of sound-iconicity in Japanese language, and show the arresting correspondence between two phenomena of Japanese culture: the image-inducing onomatopoeic words in language and the kuchishōga device in traditional music. Onomatopoeic words owe their powerful effect to the fact that their constituents are vowels and consonants, which due to their repeated use in certain contexts, to some extent have become representative of those contexts. In this way they function as recollective stimuli to summon up a situation, including its emotional and sensational aspects. The kuchishōga device,employed in music teaching, substantially benefits from the use of mimetic and onomatopoeic words in everyday language. I support Osaka’s suggestion that onomatopoeic words intensify and reinforce memory (Osaka 1999), as well as the onomatopoeic words supply a non- verbal element to human speech, making it more descriptive and colored. Such interpretation is indeed truly favorable to my treatment of the Japanese language as being highly figurative and imagistic. I draw on results obtained not exclusively from research on Japanese music, thus providing substantial proof for my hypothesis about the image-inducing character of the kuchishōga syllabary. My contribution to the kuchishōga discussion lies in proving my educated guess that the vocal sounds used in kuchishōga have an image- evoking power due to their previously fixed meaning in the onomatopoeic lexicon of the language. In hōgaku ( 邦楽 , lit.”Japanese traditional music”), kuchishōga represents timbre and playing techniques (Kikkawa 1973), leading the trained listener towards a finer appreciation of the musical work. Having based my theory of iconicity of Japanese culture as well as on the results achieved in the studying onomatopoeic words, I ascertain that kuchishōga is yet another aspect of the rich multifaceted imagistic apparatus relying on the abundance of figurative elements in the Japanese culture. Literature De Saussure F . Course in General Linguistics. NewYork: McGraw-Hill. 1959. [De Saussure, Ferdinand (1916) Cours de linguistique generale]. Gokak V. K. The Imaginative approach to Language. London: Oxford University Press. 1950.