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The present study explores the concepts behind Japanese and Swedish dimensional adjectives. The focus is on examining which similarities and differences in the conceptualisation across the two languages exist, if any at all. In order to see how concepts underlying dimensional adjectives are represented in the speaker's minds, data was collected mainly from two word-association tests. The results show that dimensional adjectives are conceptualised and represented differently by speakers of these two languages. The most remarkable difference resulting from the word-association tests is that Japanese participants associate dimensional adjectives mostly with nouns that denote entities the prominent extension of which is aptly described by the stimulus dimensional adjective (e.g. 'long' is associated with 'river'). In Swedish, however, participants associate dimensional adjectives with both adjectives and nouns, and the association patterns and their underlying conceptualisations are thus more diverse (e.g. 'high' is associated with 'building', and 'long' is associated with 'narrow').

The study is aimed to explore the mental representations of dimensional adjectives in Japanese and Swedish by using word-association test, which is largely used in the field of psychology and linguistics. The procedure of the association test is divided into two parts. In the first part native speakers of Japanese and Swedish were asked to give responses to the stimulu in their L1. In the second part Japanese learners of Swedish and Swedish learners of Japanese were asked to respond to the stimuli in their L2.

In this work I will discuss the following three issues; 1) how the dimensional expressions are represented in the mental lexicons of native speakers of Japanese and Swedish respectively, and 2) to what extent the response patterns in L2 are similar to those in L1, and lastly 3) whether there are any language specific attitude to be found in the association pattern for each language. Based on the results I assume that there is a marked difference in association patterns between Japanese and Swedish.

Japanese suffix –garu is combined with mental verbs/adjectives and this structural pattern expresses a third person’s physical or psychological representations from the speaker’s observational viewpoint. In the field of ethnogrammar it is of interest to discuss cultural constrains on the grammar of a language. The purpose of the present paper is to study the structural pattern of the Japanese suffix -garu from an ethnogrammatical perspective. I am going to discuss what types of cultural aspects the construction of -garu suffix is relating to, and what the relation is based on.