For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideo-phonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means.
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the supraseg-mental information unexplored. It also demonstrates the utility of Localized Canonical Typology, for the precise description and analysis of complex categories in a single language. Consequently, it reveals how ideophonic and prosaic reduplication are alike or different from each other. Measuring the canonicity values of the various occurring types of ideophonic and prosaic reduplication against six criteria for canonical ideophonic reduplication, this paper shows how many and what criteria can differentiate the two sets of phenomena. The current paper adopts the canonical approach of typology in an innovative way – not to compare a reduplicative phenomenon across languages (classic " typology "), but within a language by drawing ideophonic and prosaic data from Japanese, which is rich in reduplication and ideophones. Given this, the aim of this paper is not to establish one clear-cut point to distinguish ideophonic reduplication from prosaic reduplication that may be impossible, but to specify dimensions of possibilities along which several instances of ideophonic and prosaic reduplication can be calibrated, using Canonical).
Notably, both less and more iconic uses of reduplication are encountered in ordinary vocabulary resulting in the overlapping semantic functions of reduplication between ideophonic and non-ideophonic (i.e., prosaic) lexical categories.
However, not all reduplicative processes in ideophones are clearly iconic. Cross-linguistically, reduplication associated with iconic readings, such as plurality, iteration, and continuation, is prevalent in ideophones.
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