Onomatopoeia and metonymy

4. Revisiting the definition of onomatopoeia
Hrushovski (1980, p. 46) suggested the following definition of what an onomatopoeic word is: “a word (or group of words) in which a part of the sound is, in some way, equivalent to a part (or an aspect, or a metonymy) of the designation, if that part designates a sound in nature” (emphasis as in original). The significant element in this definition is its focus on “parts”, in other words, metonymy.¹¹ Hrushovski was very apt to point out that onomatopoeic forms can be metonymic, just as cuckoo is, where the perceived sound that the bird makes stands for the bird itself – i.e., we are dealing with a so-called production metonymy: the product (the bird’s song) standing for the producer (the bird). One of the most famous onomatopoeic examples of the production metonymy is exemplified by the word barbarian, which is of Greek origin. Bάρβαρος originally referred to anybody who was not Greek and spoke a different language, which sounded like var-var to the Greeks’ ears (OED). In the case of verbs, metonymy typically manifests itself as a cause–effect type (Kövecses, 2006), where the sound stands for the action or event that caused it, as in beep (“to sound (a horn); to make (something) emit a short high-pitched sound; to indicate by sounding beeps”; OED) or hiss (“to make the sharp spirant sound emitted by certain animals, as geese and serpents, or caused [e.g.] by the escape of steam through a narrow aperture, or uttered in the pronunciation of ‘s’”; OED).
However, this is just one, metonymic aspect of onomatopoeia. Not all sounds that appear in an onomatopoeic form participate in the imitation of the sound (case in point is whisper, mentioned above, or even cuckoo for that matter), which means that there is a further, whole for part metonymy involved as well, whereby the whole word stands for a couple of the sounds that do effectively participate in the process of imitation. This leads us to the following, slightly revised definition of onomatopoeia:

Onomatopoeia are novel or conventionalized words in which a part of the phonological form is perceived to be similar to the referent or to a sound metonymically associated with it.

The whole for part metonymy is especially prevalent in conventionalized onomatopoeic forms, such as whisper, click or clatter (as opposed to more novel ones, such as patta-patta-patta, see above), where the imitation of the sound is less perceivable and the word form has undergone substantial lexicalization. This makes onomatopoeic forms veritable substitution acts in that they can involve not just one, but two metonymies at the same time – depending on the degree to which the imitation of the sound is perceivable in the onomatopoeic form.

Thus, when it comes to the imitation of a sound by onomatopoeia, it is all a matter of degree and boundaries are hard – or impossible – to draw. Both Kadooka (2005) and Rhodes (1994) have focused on this particular feature of onomatopoeia in attempting to delimit the word’s meaning, though with slightly different perspectives. Kadooka (2005) specifies four levels of lexicalization; Level 1 represents the least lexicalized stage, while words at Level 4 are integrated most fully into the lexicon – see Table 1.


Table 1. Levels of lexicalization in onomatopoeia (source: Kadooka 2005, p. 3).