On the ordering of elements in ideophonic echo-words versus prosaic dvandva compounds, with special reference to Korean and Japanese

Building on Childs's (Pragmat Soc 5(3):341-354, 2014) proposal that skewed phonotactic distributions provide a legitimate resource for expressiveness in ideophones, often described as iconic words, this study examines whether there are differences in element ordering between ideophonic echo-words and prosaic dvandva compounds, with special reference to Korean and Japanese. Measured against Cooper and Ross's (in: Papers from the parasession on functionalism, Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, pp 63-111, 1975) claimed-to-be-universal phonological constraints for the ordering of conjoined elements pertaining to element-initial consonants and vowels, the study reveals that both Korean and Japanese data comply with the constraints in general. However, in Korean, echo-words are significantly different from dvandva compounds in their compliance with the consonant constraint while they are not so with the vowel constraint. In reverse, echowords and dvandva compounds in Japanese show a significant difference in their compliance with the vowel constraint but not with the consonant constraint. The findings provide quantitative evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of the proposed phonological principles for element ordering and the language-specific phonotactic deviance of ideophones vis-à-vis the matrix language for the preferred ordering patterns.