The abstract submission deadline has been extended to March 23, 2018!

Submit your paper here!

The First Conference on Pokémonastics is to be held at Keio University from May 26 (Sat) to 27 (Sun)! This conference is the first installment of Theoretical Linguistics at Keio (TaLK) 2018, sponsored by the Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistics Studies.

Recent studies (“Pokémonastics”) have identified sound symbolic relationships in Japanese Pokémon names (Kawahara et al, to appear; Kawahara & Kumagai to appear). More specifically, both mora counts and number of voiced obstruents in their name seem to, albeit stochastically, affect Pokémon characters’ size, weight, and strength parameters. Vowel quality in initial syllables seems to have a tangible effect as well.

A natural question that arises is whether these sorts of sound symbolic patterns hold in Pokémon names in other languages. Another open question is whether there are other types of sound symbolic patterns.

We invite researchers addressing these questions in any languages. Our hope is that based on cross-linguistic Pokémonastic research we can explore important questions about sound-meaning relationship in natural languages, such as language-specificity and universality of sound symbolism.

The conference also features talks by the invited speakers that are not related to Pokémonastics. We also intend to have poster sessions by researchers in Japan on topics related to Pokémonastics or otherwise. See call for papers for details.

In summary, this conference will have three main themes:

Pokémonastic talks on several languages Non-Pokémonastics talks by invited speakers Poster sessions that we hope would facilitate international communication between researchers in Japan and invited speakers. (Non-invited, non-Japanese-residing researchers are of course welcome).

Place: Keio University, Mita Campus

Acknowledgments: This research is supported by JSPS Grant # 17K13448 to Shigeto Kawahara, and Keio research grants to Shigeto Kawahara and Yasuyo Minagawa.

Disclaimer: All Pokémonastic pictures used in this website are *not* existing Pokémon characters, drawn originally for the purpose of Pokémonastic experiments. The copyright for the original Pokémon characeters belong to Pokémon Company International, Inc.

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