earticle

영어

This paper focused on the polysemy in mimetic words of softness in Japanese　and　 Korean. According to the synesthetic study of these mimetic words of softness which has been pursued by the author, there are many words with peripheral meaning besides the central meaning, and they are transferred to various senses such as sight, hearing and taste from tactile sense. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the polysemous structure in the two languages by exploring the use of metaphysical extension. As a result of the study, it was found that the expansion of the meaning of the two languages has basically the same direction. The first is a positive direction such as gentleness and kindness, conformability, femininity and calmness. The other is a negative direction such as weakness, indecisiveness, instability and unreliability. These two directions can be considered as a universal meaning of softness. As for semantic extensions in both languages, there are many description of psychological aspect and about people, and next there are items such as atmosphere, scent (odor) and organization of society, in addition, light and sound in Korean. It was found that Korean has more expanded polysemous structure than Japanese, such as visual and auditory sense In comparison with the semantic extensions of adjectives and mimetic words, meaning of adjective “soft” is mainly extended only to positive direction in both languages and there are meaning of “flexible, calm, quiet, friendly”. In Japanese, it was found that there is a meaning range of another adjective “fragile(moroi)” in the semantic expansion of negative direction.