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A comparative study of Japanese and Korean onomatopoeia for the sense of pain

  • The Japanese Language Association of Korea
  • Abbr : JLAK
  • 2021, (70), pp.109-126
  • DOI : 10.14817/jlak.2021.70.109
  • Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Received : September 30, 2021
  • Accepted : November 17, 2021
  • Published : December 20, 2021

EUNSOOHEE 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study defines Japanese and Korean onomatopoeia representing pain as "Nociception Onomatopoeia", and examines linguistic expressions used for the onomatopoeia in both languages. Furthermore, it elucidates the meaning extension of “Nociception Onomatopoeia”. For this, first, "Nociception Onomatopoeia" were extracted from prior research, onomatopoeia and mimetic word dictionaries, and pain-related data, and then classified into “body parts” and “types of pain”. The “body parts” were divided into <head>, <shoulders>, <eyes>, <ears>, <nose>, <face>, <teeth>, <tongue>, <neck>, <chest>, <abdomen>, <arms/legs>, <skin> and <whole body> and “types of pain” were divided into <sore/stiffness>, <itch>, <dry>, <dizziness>, <convulsions> and <fever/chilling>. The study did not stop at the semantic usage of the dictionary, but found actual usage examples through corpus and newspaper materials of both countries and revealed the expression patterns, and further examined the aspect of expanding to other meanings other than nociception in the aspect of “equivocality” of the vocabulary. "Nociception Onomatopoeia" tend to expand into negative emotions, but in some cases, they expand to positive meanings. Further, it is an interesting result from the point of view of a comparative study that the onomatopoeia of Japanese and Korean, which are used similarly in the meaning of pain, appear differently in terms of meaning expansion. Onomatopoeia has a strong correlation between sound and meaning in nature, but this nature is blurred as the concrete meaning of “Nociception” associated to body parts is expanded to the onomatopoeia representing a person's emotion or personality. Communication using concise onomatopoeia is very important in urgent medical settings. In considering actual medical situations, nociception-related expressions can be further distinguished into the intensity, scope, and persistence of nociception. We plan to continue our research on these respects in the future.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.