Interview with Kimi Akita

要旨

Since completing your PhD thesis on ideophones in Japanese and other languages at Kobe University (Akita 2009), to your postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo and UC Berkeley, and now as Associate Professor at Nagoya University, where you’ve just hosted one of the largest international symposiums on iconicity (IcoLL2026), you’ve devoted your career to the study of ideophones and iconicity. You’ve written countless articles, authored several books—including a recent Japanese bestseller with the psychologist Mutsumi Imai, Gengo no honshitsu [The nature of language] (Imai & Akita 2023)—as well as editing many more, among them landmark publications like Ideophones, mimetics and expressives (Akita & Pardeshi 2019) and, more recently, the mammoth Oxford handbook of iconicity in language (Fischer et al. 2026). In both English and Japanese, for the general public as well as scholars, you’ve analyzed virtually every aspect of ideophones—their phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, typology, history, and acquisition. Tell me, what is it about ideophones that keeps you coming back for more? What makes them so special to you? I’m curious to know where this passion comes from.

主題