The Sound Symbolic Patterns in Pokémon Move Names in Japanese

要旨

In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatically growing interest in sound symbolism, systematic associations between sounds and meanings. A recent case study of sound symbolism shows that in Pok´emon games, longer names are generally associated with stronger Pok´emon characters, and moreover those Pok´emon characters with names having more voiced obstruents are generally stronger (Kawahara et al., 2018b). The current study examined the productivity of these sound symbolic effects in the names of the moves that Pok´emon creatures use when they battle. The analysis of the existing move names shows that the effect of name length on attack values is robust, and that the effect of voiced obstruents is tangible. These sound symbolic patterns hold, despite the fact that most (= 99%) move names are based on real words in Japanese. An additional experiment with nonce names shows that both of these effects are very robust. Overall, the current paper adds to the growing body of studies showing that the relationships between sounds and meanings are not as arbitrary as modern linguistic theories have standardly assumed. Uniquely, the current analysis of the existing move names shows that such non-arbitrary relationships can hold even when the set of words under consideration are mostly existing words (Shih & Rudin, 2019; Sidhu et al., 2019).

主題