Sound symbolic patterns in Pokémon move names
Shigeto Kawahara
March 2020 

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 Pokémon games, longer names are generally associated with stronger Pokémon characters, and moreover those Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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). [This paper is in collaboration with Michinori Suzuki (ICU) and Gakuji Kumagai (Meikai)].

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003742 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	ICU Working Papers in Linguistics 10: 17-30.
keywords:	sound symbolism, pokemon, voiced obstruents, mora count, move!, phonology
previous versions:	v3 [January 2019] v2 [October 2018] v1 [November 2017]
Downloaded:	1333 times

 

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