Onomatopoetic words – between speech and language

Abstract

The article is devoted to the class of onomatopoetic interjections in Russian (e.g. miau-miau, bats, chpock and so on). Their primary function is to represent sound imitations. Some of them can also function as predicates and as metatekst words. There are few classifications of Russian onomatopoetic words. In one of them these words should be classified according to the level of their conventional status, relevant to translation purposes (Vlakhov, 1980). On the one end of the conventional scale words are highly conventional, language specific and translatable (gav-gav, tik-tak). On the other end of the scale there are nonconventional words, iconically depicting the sound itself. One more classification tends to divide these words as depicting acoustic events / non-depicting acoustic events, but indicating actions and demonstrating emotional effect of suddenness (Sharonov, 2010; Kanerva, 2018). The special attention in the article is devoted to the analysis of three groups of words which have not been considered precisely by Russian linguists. One group serves to interpret musical sounds, one more group serves to interpret chats, assess somebody’s words as bullshits (bla-bla, traly-valy and so on). And the last one contains onomatopoetic euphemisms of swear words.