Manga communicates diverse qualities of sound through visual effects applied to writing. Voices in spoken dialogue, thoughts, and voiceovers are often represented through different type fonts or handwriting. This serves as a narrative tool to differentiate between text categories but also gives each one of them a specific resonance in the reader’s mind. Manga employs a multitude of usually handwritten mimetic words to express sounds and other sensations. Among the various graphic shapes these words assume is a semi-materialization of the written characters, which can undergo physical effects of the represented phenomenon and enter the spatial depth of the storyworld. The Japanese writing system heavily facilitates the visual characteristics of mimetics in manga, be it with the expressive use of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, the vowel-lengthening symbol, or the sonant mark.

This chapter discusses adverbs in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). It consists of two parts: the first part provides an overview of the account of adverbs in RRG with illustrations from English and shows that they occur in the periphery of the nucleus, core or clause. The second part focuses on ideophonic (or mimetic) adverbs in Japanese and a few other languages as a further illustration of the RRG account of adverbs and its typological scope, and argues that ideophonic adverbs modify either the nucleus or core in Japanese, while they also occur as a nuclear-internal modifier in a Totonac-Tepehua language.