Ryoko Sasamoto

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Nara Women's University

Onomatopoeia is typically described as involving the use of words which imitate sounds. The study of onomatopoeia is often approached through theories of sound symbolism. However, while such approaches provide rich descriptions of onomatopoeia, they have generally paid little attention to the role of onomatopoeia in communication. In this study, we...

In many Asian countries such as Japan, the use of intra-lingual open captions on TV is prevalent and well established. This novel use of what is commonly called “Telop” in Japan, also referred to as impact captions elsewhere, has recently begun to spread into Western counterparts, with a notable example being the BBC’s Sherlock. To our knowle...

This paper shows that although the discourse connectives dakara and sorede have both been analyzed as encoding a cause–consequence relationship, they are not always interchangeable. I re-assess these expressions from a relevance-theoretic perspective, in particular, in light of the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning (Blakemore, 2...

In recent years, consumers have been faced with an increasing number of food choices, and they must consider multiple factors such as health concerns, nutritional content, animal welfare, sustainability, and climate change. While the language of food has attracted scholarly attention in linguistics, there are few studies in cognitive pragmatics tha...

This paper explores three pragmatic challenges that learners of Japanese as L2 encountered during their study abroad programs and work placements in Japan. These challenges are examined within the framework of Relevance Theory. Research on interlanguage pragmatics of L2 Japanese is limited in scope, as studies mostly focus on speech acts and other...

This article explores challenging ethical issues involved in the conduct of ethnographic fieldwork in an online translator community. How online ethnography is different from its offline counterparts is increasingly being discussed. Many discussions have revolved around the research ethics potentially changed by such differences. It is not uncommon...

Online communication has created new ways to express emotions, including emoji and reaction GIFs. Emoji are often discussed as signs for meaning-making, adding emotional tone to communication. Reaction GIFs express emotions and attitudes in a playful manner. This study shows that through the lens of cognitive pragmatics, these phenomena are not dis...

It is generally acknowledged that onomatopoeia poses challenges for translation. However, there is little research into the translation of onomatopoeia in Pragmatics. This study seeks to examine the nature of onomatopoeia and its implications for translation from the perspective of relevance theory, addressing, in particular, the following question...

The use of captions has grown in recent years in both traditional and new media, particularly in terms of the diversity of style, content, and function. Impact captions have emerged as a popular form of captions for hearing viewers and contain rich multimodal information which is employed to capture viewer attention and enhance engagement, particul...

This study is concerned with the reception of onomatopoeia in the English translation of digital manga. In manga, onomatopoeia is often presented as part of the aesthetics, being both verbal (meaning) and non-verbal (showing) simultaneously. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic notion of a showing-saying continuum (Sperber and Wilson 1995), this stud...

The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, puns, irony) while others deal with issues not readily associated with figu...

Research and discussions over the relationship between executive function, multimedia viewing, and sedentary human behavior are becoming increasingly popular throughout academia and mainstream media. While some studies report screen-viewing behavior as being associated with reduced levels of physical activity, other studies have also reported assoc...

This article argues that fan translation serves as a contemporary, alternative mechanism for the circulation of global media texts. By focusing on the fan subtitling practice in the case of Thai fansubbing of a Korean TV programme, we observe unique ways in which fans exploit semiotic resources to produce fansubs in relation to professional subtitl...

Unlike previous chapters, this chapter focuses on the translation of onomatopoeia. Its main aim is to show whether onomatopoeia is indeed difficult to translate and poses a challenge for translators, a commonly accepted view of onomatopoeia in Translation Studies. To this end, this study conducts a corpus-based analysis using the parallel corpus bu...

Having focused on the non-verbal aspect of onomatopoeia in Chap. 3, this chapter will focus on the lexical aspect. A range of examples will be analysed in terms of the notions developed in relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics. It will be argued that what appears to be the polysemous nature of onomatopoeia is a result of lexical modification and a...

This chapter summarises the main argument of the current study, its limitations, and future implications. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic notions of the showing–saying continuum, perceptual resemblance, and impressions, it is argued that onomatopoeia necessarily involves both showing and saying aspects of communication, providing both direct (no...

This chapter sets out to examine the contribution of onomatopoeia in multimodal discourse with a particular focus on Japanese manga, where onomatopoeia is prevalently used in a highly stylised manner. This suggests that, in addition to both showing and saying elements which onomatopoeia has by nature, onomatopoeia in manga has a further showing ele...

Following on from the discussion in Chap. 2, this chapter presents an alternative account of onomatopoeia in the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Blackwell, 1986/1995). It will be argued that onomatopoeia is located on the continuum of showing and saying and involves communication via percep...

From this chapter onwards, the focus will be on the role of onomatopoeia in different types of discourse. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the role of onomatopoeia in food discourse and to explain how the use of onomatopoeia in food writing helps the reader to experience enforced synaesthesia, in that readers will share the sensory experience...

This chapter focuses on the sound-symbolism-based approach, which has been dominant in onomatopoeia research. It is often claimed in sound-symbolism research that there is a systematic or non-arbitrary link between sound and meaning. This view of onomatopoeia presents a particular challenge to de Saussure’s (1916) notion that the link between word,...

"This book provides an innovative and insightful analysis of onomatopoeia, and it is an original and convincing application of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework. It combines a strong theoretical argument with discussion of real-world examples and applications. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in expressive or persuasive writing (...

How does international research portray sedentary screen viewing behaviour and their relationship to human executive function? The researchers will search the following electronic bibliographic databases: ScienceDirect, Scopus, PsycINFO, and Web of Science (Science and Social Science Citation Index). The search strategy will include terms that de...

This paper presents an application of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) to pictures by studying the role that weak implicatures may play in the persuasiveness of multimodal argumentative discourse. We take a relevance-theoretic approach to the discussion of visual and multimodal argumentation with a particular focus on the role of onomato...

As the profession of translation has become more technologized, translators increasingly work within an interface that combines translation from scratch, translation memory suggestions, machine translation post-editing, and terminological resources. This study analyses user activity data from one such interface, and measures temporal effort for Eng...

Japanese and other Asian TV producers have been deploying multi-colored, and highly visible, intra-lingual captions on TV programs to enhance their appeal and to influence their viewers’ interpretations. The practice of adding these captions is far from innocent and is prone to abuse and overuse due to the lack of official guidelines and an evidenc...

The irregular use of katakana has been analysed mainly in descriptive terms and is often considered to be a device for creating homonyms or communicating emotions (See Ogakiuchi, 2010). This chapter examines the irregular use of katakana notation from the perspective of relevance theory. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the images and...