The Usage Mechanism of Japanese Ideophones in the Description of Taste: Morphological and co-occurrence analysis of the description of wines and sakes
Hiroki Fukushima, Mutsumi Imai, Shigenori Tanaka
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2017.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v8n3/jclv8n3_2.pdf
Abstract:
In this study, we examined ideophones (onomatopoeias or sound symbolism) in taste descriptions of wine and
sake using quantitative text analysis and morphological analysis to investigate how sound symbolic expressions function
(word count of wine text: 201,294; word count of sake text: 50,147).We found the following co-occurrence tendencies for
Japanese ideophones in the tasting corpora: ideophones are used to modify words for taste, rather than words for brewing or
grades of wines and sakes. More specifically, ideophones are used to express the sense of â€˜appearingâ€™ or â€˜finishingâ€™ of flavours
(specifically in the Sake Corpus). Morphological analysis of these texts in comparison to the BCCWJ (The Balanced Corpus
of Contemporary Written Japanese) revealed that double consonant patterns are a characteristic form in the tasting
descriptions. Integrating these findings with those of the text analysis, we concluded that the ideophones are employed to
describe breaking points, turning points, and changing processes of taste, rather than stable states. Therefore, ideophones
can be distinguished from general adverbs, which mainly describe the states and manners of objects or events.