This study explores whether L2 Japanese speakers produce for the purpose of expressiveness by examining the production of expressive morphology and accompanying gesture used by L2 Japanese speakers with English as L1 and Korean as L1, with L1 Japanese speakers as baseline. We demonstrate that, unlike in L1, some mimetics in L2 may be used as ordinary words and that gestures accompanying mimetics may have different roles.
This study explores the expressiveness of mimetics in L2 Japanese by focusing on their morphological features and the gestures accompanying them. Mimetics (also called 'ideophones') are a group of words which not only imitate sound-symbolic associations, as in onomatopoeia (e.g., bang) but also capture manner of action (e.g., gorogo for rolling), psychological state (e.g., muka for anger) or perceptual sensation (e.g., chiku for a sting) related to an entity or an event. Japanese has an elaborate system of mimetics. We are interested in whether L2 speakers of Japanese use mimetics as a means of being expressive in the way that L1 Japanese speakers do or whether L2 speakers use these words more like ordinary words without producing expressive features orally or manually. We focused on descriptions of motion events by two groups of L2 Japanese speakers, those with English as L1, a language with a limited use of mimetics, and those with Korean as L1, a language with an elaborate system of mimetics. We examined the expressive features of mimetics (i.e. the use of geminates, vowel lengthening and repetition). In addition, we also examined the physical traits of gestures that accompany mimetics such as the handedness (one hand vs. two hands) and the use of gesture space. Data consisted of motion event descriptions by 13 English and 18 Korean intermediate to advanced learners of Japanese along with the data from 14 L1 speakers of Japanese. The results showed that while L2 speakers used mimetics to be expressive to some extent, we also found a pattern not found in L1, i.e. mimetics with limited expressive features but with gestures which occupy relatively small gesture space. These results suggest that some mimetics in L2 may be used as ordinary vocabulary and that L2 gestures accompanying mimetics may play different roles.
