Kimi Akita

Kimi Akita is Associate Professor at the Department of English Linguistics, School of Humanities, Nagoya University.

Website

•  Ideophones, mimetics, expressives, onomatopoeia
•  Sound symbolism
• Iconicity in language
• Frame semantics, construction morphology, linguistic typology

•  Akita, Kimi. 2004. Some Semantic Properties of Unergative Psych Verbs: Activity of Worry and Stativity of Be Worried. BA thesis, Aichi Prefectural University. (supervisor: Yoshiharu Kumagai)
•  Akita, Kimi. 2006. The “Embodied” Semantics of Japanese Psych Mimetics. MA thesis, Kobe University. (supervisor: Yo Matsumoto)
• Akita, Kimi. 2009. A Grammar of Sound-Symbolic Words in Japanese: Theoretical Approaches to Iconic and Lexical Properties of Mimetics. PhD dissertation, Kobe University. (supervisor: Yo Matsumoto)

•  Born in Aichi, Japan, 1982
• BA in English Linguistics, Aichi Prefectural University, 2004
• MA in Linguistics, Kobe University, 2006
• PhD in Linguistics, Kobe University, 2009/JSPS Research Fellow DC2, 2007–2009
• JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Tokyo, 2009–2011
• Visiting Scholar and Postdoc Affairs Program, University of California, Berkeley, California, 2009–2010
• Lecturer, Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University, 2011–2015
• Associate Professor, Department of Applied Linguistics, Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, 2015–2017
• Visiting Associate Professor at the Theory and Typology Division, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), 2016–2021
• Associate Professor, Department of English Linguistics, School of Humanities and Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, 2017–present

• Osaka University President’s Research Encouragement Award, 2013
• NINJAL Yutaka Miyaji Award for Japanese Studies (for the book Onomatope no NinchiKagaku [Cognitive Science of Ideophones] (Shinyosha, 2022)), National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2023
• Shinsho Paperback Award 2024 (for the book Gengo no Honshitsu: Kotoba wa Doo Umare, Shinka shita ka [The Nature of Language: How Language Was Born and Evolved] (co-authored with Mutsumi Imai, Chuokoron, 2023)), Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2024
• Best Asian Books of the Year (for Gengo no Honshitsu: Kotoba wa Doo Umare, Shinkashita ka [The Nature of Language: How Language Was Born and Evolved] (co-authoedwith Mutsumi Imai, Chuokoron, 2023)), Korea Publishers Society (KOPUS), 2024

• Hiraga, Masako K., William J. Herlofsky, Kazuko Shinohara, and Kimi Akita (eds.). 2015. Iconicity: East Meets West. (Iconicity in Language and Literature 14.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Iwasaki, Noriko, Peter Sells, and Kimi Akita (eds.). 2017. The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics: Perspectives from Structure, Acquisition, and Translation. (Routledge Studies in East Asian Linguistics 1.) London: Routledge.
• Akita, Kimi and Prashant Pardeshi (eds.). 2019. Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives. (Iconicity in Language and Literature 16.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Horie, Kaoru, Kimi Akita, and Hiroaki Kitano. 2021. Gengo Ruikeiron [Linguistic typology]. (Latest English and General Linguistics 12.) Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
• Akita, Kimi, with Naoyuki Uchimura as a facilitator. 2022. Onomatope no NinchiKagaku [Cognitive Science of Ideophones]. (Invitation to Cognitive Science 9.) Tokyo: Shinyosha.
• Imai, Mutsumi and Kimi Akita. 2023. Gengo no Honshitsu: Kotoba wa Doo Umare, Shinka shita ka [The Nature of Language: How Language Was Born and Evolved]. Tokyo: Chuokoron-Shinsha.
• Fischer, Olga, Kimi Akita, and Pamela Perniss (eds.). 2026. The Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kubozono, Haruo, Kimi Akita, Ayumi Ueyama, Satoshi Kinsui, and Yuki Hirose (eds.). 2027. Ronten Gengogaku [Issues in Linguistics]. Kyoto: Minerva Shobo.

• Akita, Kimi. 2010. An embodied semantic analysis of mimetic psych-predicates in Japanese. Linguistics 48(6): 1195–1220.
• Akita, Kimi. 2012. Toward a frame-semantic definition of sound-symbolic words: A collocational analysis of Japanese mimetics. Cognitive Linguistics 23(1): 67–90.
• Akita, Kimi. 2013. Constraints on the semantic extension of onomatopoeia. The Public Journal of Semiotics 5(1): 21–37.
• Akita, Kimi and Takeshi Usuki. 2016. A constructional account of the “optional”quotative marking on Japanese mimetics. Journal of Linguistics 52(2): 245–275.
• Akita, Kimi. 2017. The “dynamic” nature of stative mimetic verbs in Japanese. Journal of Cognitive Linguistics 2: 39–56.
• Akita, Kimi. 2017. The linguistic integration of Japanese ideophones and its typological implications. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 62(2): 314–334.
• Dingemanse, Mark and Kimi Akita. 2017. An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese. Journal of Linguistics 53(3): 501–532.
• Akita, Kimi. 2019. Ideophones. In Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Akita, Kimi and Mark Dingemanse. 2019. Ideophones (mimetics, expressives). In Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Akita, Kimi. 2021. Phonation types matter in sound symbolism. Cognitive Science 45(5): e12982.
• Akita, Kimi. 2021. A typology of depiction marking: The prosody of Japanese ideophones and beyond. Studies in Language 45(4): 865–886.
• Akita, Kimi and Keiko Murasugi. 2022. Binomial adjective doublets in Japanese: A Relational Morphology account. Morphology 32: 281–297.
• Imai, Mutsumi and Kimi Akita. 2023. The iconicity ring hypothesis bridges the gap between symbol grounding and linguistic relativity. Topics in Cognitive Science 15: 676–682.
• Akita, Kimi, Bonnie McLean, Jiyeon Park, and Arthur Lewis Thompson. 2024. Iconicity mediates semantic networks of sound symbolism. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 155(4): 2687–2697.
• Akita, Kimi. 2025. Voice quality has robust visual associations in English and Japanese speakers. Open Linguistics 11(1): 20250069.
• Akita, Kimi. 2025. Ideophones are more reliable than metaphors in Japanese pain descriptions. Language and Cognition 17: e7, 1–15.
• Akita, Kimi and Shigeto Kawahara. 2025. Iconic prosody enhances the depictive power of ideophones. Language and Cognition 17: e77, 1–24.
• McLean, Bonnie. 2026. Interview with Kimi Akita. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 23(1): 229–243.