Japanese interpretations of “pain” and the use of psychomimes

Abstract

This paper examines six Japanese psychomimes —zuki-zuki, kiri-kiri, shiku-shiku, chiku-chiku, hiri-hiri, andgan-gan— that express subtle differences in states or sensations regarding “pain”. It is generally recognized, however, that many languages lack words with the same meanings as these Japanese psychomimes and that their meanings are difficult to capture precisely. The definitions in Japanese-English dictionaries, for example, are not sufficient to explain the exact meanings and there is also the problem that each Japanese expression can correspond to several English verbs. This study applies the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to explicate the meaning of the six Japanese psychomimes. It makes reference to a corpus of naturally-occurring examples compiled from publicly available sources from physicians, patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. The analysis indicates that each psychomime conveys a vivid metaphorical meaning. The quality of the pain is suggested by reference to an imagined scenario of something moving inside a part of the body or touching part of the body. This imagined ‘something’ can be understood as something ‘sharp’ or as something similar to ‘fire’ or to ‘metal’. The use of psychomimes is an effective and efficient way for expressing and understanding “pain” in Japanese.

Effects of affective phonological iconicity in online language processing: Evidence from a letter search task.

“…In particular, Auracher, Albers, Zhai, Gareeva, and Stavniychuk (2010) reported plosives versus nasals to be used more often to express active versus passive emotion in poetry from different language families. Recent evidence involves Japanese psychomimes (see Asano-Cavanagh, 2014; Kurosawa, Takezawa, & Pham, 2014) but also Indo-European languages in which systematicity is generally considered sparse: Valence ratings in five Indo-European languages appear associated with words’ initial phonemes. Although across languages, no common group of responsible phonemes was identified, associations of negative valence with shorter naming latencies suggest an iconic source in terms of rapid alert (Adelman, Estes, & Cossu, 2018).…”