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I don't know if "part-of-speech" is the best term here, since it generally has
a Western language orientation, but I am curious as to what function the word
_gegege_ has in reference to the TV show title _GeGeGe no Kitarō_. I asked my
grandma—a native Japanese speaker—what exactly this meant. She said that it
didn't really have a lexical or direct _meaning_ in the same way a noun would.
I take this to mean that the _gegege_ is kind of there for the sake of being
there and for how it sounds.

I've noticed that Japanese seems to have lots of interjections or onomatopoeic
words which don't always have a direct and easily definable _meaning_ (e.g.
ねー, as in, ちょうっとーまって **ね** ), but _gegege_ seems to be even farther along the
spectrum of easily definable words. Is there a grammatical category for such a
word?
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meaning onomatopoeia parts-of-speech child-speech
What part-of-speech is ゲゲゲ in ゲゲゲの鬼太郎?
There are several issues here. First, let's review the “meaning” of _Gegege_ ;
then let's think a bit more carefully about what does it mean to try to
classify words as "parts of speech", and how does _Gegege_ fit into them.

The word _Gegege_ was created by Shigeru Mizuki based on the way he
mispronounced his name as a toddler: _Gegeru_. So our first attempt could be
to classify it as a noun, and intuitively it seems to fit. However, at the
same time, it does have the general look-and-feel of a Japanese onomatopoeia,
and doesn't seem to _refer_ to something, like "Shigeru" refers to the author;
and, in the iconic first-generation anime opening, _ge-ge-ge_ appears to be
sung by frogs. Given that the Japanese frog onomatopoeia is _gero-gero_ , it's
a fair bet that we can consider it to be an onomatopoia—or, more generally, a
[sound-symbolic word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone) (also called
“ideophone”, “phonomime”, “mimetic word” etc. etc.; Japanese: 擬態語 _gitaigo_
)—that is, a word where the sound of the word itself suggests a feeling,
manner or sensation (auditory or otherwise). As a sound-symbolic word, to me
at least _Gegege_ feels croaky, critter-y, monster-y, perhaps somewhat yucky
(cf. ゲー , a vomit onomatopoeia).

Now, what is it that you want to know when you ask what “part of speech” or
“grammatical category” it is? Traditional parts of speech terms, like “noun”
or “verb”, have two different and independent usages. The first is _formal:_
it tells how the word relates to other words, more or less mechanically; how
it inflects (or doesn't), where can it be inserted… For example, in English,
only a noun may follow “the”:¹ you can say “the frog” but not “*the sing” or
“*the of”. In Japanese, only a nominal (体言 _taigen_ ) may be followed by _no_.
So _Gegege_ is a noun, because it's followed by _no_ ; end of story.² If the
title was _Gegege **na** Kitaro_, then _Gegege_ would be a na-adjective; if it
was _Gegegeru Kitaro_ it would be a verb, etc. So we define noun
“distributionally”; that is, based on how “noun” words are distributed in
actual use among other words.

Please notice that this definition of "parts of speech" has _nothing to do
with meaning_. It treats words as abstract pieces in a game board, and
identify word classes by what rules they follow when combining with each
other.

A different, older, and fuzzier definition of parts of speech is based on
meanings: for example, nouns are "things", adjectives are "attributes" of the
things, and verbs are "actions" ("to kick"), "events" ("to die") or "states"
("to like") of the things. This makes intuitive sense, but it's easy to see
that this definition is squishy and not very clear:

  * A bomb exploded yesterday.
  * There was an explosion yesterday.

The verb "exploded" and the noun "explosion" are referring to the same event.
(Many nouns refer to events, including "kiss", "death", _seppuku_ and so on.)

  * I only kiss hunks.
  * I only kiss them if they're manly.

Here the adjective "manly" points to the same thing as the noun "hunk".

We can avoid this problem if we say that nouns _usually_ or _typically_ refer
to "things", verbs to "events", and adjectives to "attributes". What's more,
if we want to use a noun as a property or an event, we may have to add extra
stuff to it: "man" → "man **ly** ", "man **ning** " etc. But we never need to
annotate or "mark" a noun to denote a thing, a verb an event, or an adjective
a property. This insight is due to Croft, who distinguishes (formal,
distributional) nouns, verbs and adjectives from (semantic) Objects, Events
and Properties; the former typically denote the latter, but not necessarily.

It should now be clear that _Gegege_ is, formally, a noun; but that doesn't
mean that, semantically, it must refer to an Object (and it doesn't; it's
sound-symbolic). _-ne_ is an entirely different beast; you can't say * _ne no
Kitaro_ , * _ne da_ etc.; it always comes at the end of phrases, so it's a
phrasal postposition (literally something "positioned after phrases";
Japanese: 終助詞 _shūjoshi_ ). And, semantically, it's a discourse helper,
comparable to English tag questions like "isn't it?"; it doesn't refer to
things, but rather express the speaker's attitude to what they're saying, or
the discourse [modality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_modality).

* * *

**Footnotes:**

1) You can also say things like "the beautiful people", where an adjective
follows "the"; but this is because the sequence [beautiful people] works, for
all intents and purposes, just like a noun, and can be used wherever a noun
can ("they are the Englishmen" → "they are the [beautiful people]"), etc. It's
a "noun phrase".

And what about things like "the good, the bad and the ugly", which have no
apparent nouns? I think you'd agree that, intuitively, it feels like putting
the word "ugly" after a "the" makes it into a noun, precisely because "the"
expects a noun.

2) There's a small set of strange words which may take _no_ but are not nouns,
like _kanari_ "considerably" or _tobitobi_ "here and there". We can identify
those distributionally because, unlike nouns, they don't occur as a subject
marked by _-ga_ or as an object marked by _-wo_. I set aside the trickier
cases for simplicity. Incidentally, it's easy to find ゲゲゲ as a standalone noun
(marked with を／が) on the Internet; but in those cases it seems to be a simple
abbreviation for 『ゲゲゲの鬼太郎』.
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Apparently ゲゲゲ comes from the nickname ゲゲゲのしげる _GeGeGe no Shigeru_ of the
creator of the series Shi **ge** ru Mizuki, who pronounced his name げげる as a
small child. (At least this seems to be the consensus of [this 教えて！goo
question](http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/1876881.html), citing interviews with
Mizuki broadcast on Japanese television.)

In other words, ゲゲゲ is a representation of child speech.

I think that ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 is probably understood as a **quotation** , as in
「ゲゲゲ」の鬼太郎, i.e. the _kitarō_ , who (always) says 「ゲゲゲ」. Maybe a bit like
"Howdy" John Smith—the John Smith, who always says "Howdy".

Functionally or formally, quotations behave like **nouns** and if we are
indeed dealing with a case of "mention" rather than "use", it might not
wouldn't really matter what part-of-speech ゲゲゲ were.

But ゲゲゲ itself is probably best considered an
[**ideophone**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone), i.e. some mysterious
word class that records a particular sound. Something that's different from
the parts-of-speech we know and love (verbs, adjectives, etc.).
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