Onomatopoeia and metonymy

Example	Quotative
Inflective
Level 1	hjckrrh	+	–
Level 2	bow-wow, mew	+	–
Level 3	pop	±	±
Level 4	chatter	–	+

“Quotative” refers to the crudeness of the entry – in other words, the degree to which the onomatopoeic form is used only to “quote” the sound that it represents. When the entry for “quotative” changes from a plus to a minus sign, then this means that the onomatopoeic form is no longer a direct citation and becomes either a verb or noun. “Inflective” is concerned with syntactic class; a plus sign indicates that the onomatopoeic word in question is used as a verb or an adjective, and in this respect can be considered as more fully integrated into the lexicon, as it is not used (or rather, no longer used) for quotative purposes. Accordingly, Level 1 onomatopoeic words are typically nonce formations that often violate the rules of phonology by consisting of, for example, consonants only – such as hjckrrh (which is the sound that a gryphon makes – Kadooka 2005, p. 4). The exclamation grrr used when one is angry or annoyed is a further example of Level 1 types. Examples of the Level 2 type are mostly the sounds that animals make (such as the coo of pigeons or the oink of pigs), and which are slightly more lexicalized than Level 1 types. The main difference between Level 2 and Level 3 is inflection: in the case of the latter, inflected forms are possible (though not for all cases); thus, bleep as a noun can be used in the singular or plural (What did penetrate, however, was the high-pitched electronic bleep of my phone) and as a verb it can be inflected both for number and tense (Armand first tried Stanholme’s office but, receiving no reply, he then rang the switchboard and asked the operator to bleep him).¹² Double values are for those words that can be used in more than one syntactic category (similarly to bleep; Kadooka 2005, p. 5):

“Pop! went the cork” [interjection; + Quotative; –Inflection]

“The cork popped from the champagne bottle” [verb; –Quotative; +Inflective]

Finally, Level 4 onomatopoeia represent the final stage of lexicalization; their sound shape merely suggests the sound mimetic quality, as in zoom. While the etymology of the word is onomatopoeic, its form has undergone significant modifications to adapt to the confines of phonological rules. Many of the Level 4 type onomatopoeic words have also been semantically remotivated, as in the case of chuck-will’s-widow (the name of a bird imitative of its sound).

The introduction of the terms “wild” and “tame” was suggested by Rhodes (1994, p. 279) to designate two endpoints on a scale of imitativeness. Accordingly, at the very extreme wild end we make full use of our vocal tracts to imitate sounds that are not of human origin, while at the tame end the imitated sound conforms to a more-or-less similar phoneme or phonemic combination. For example, while onomatopoeia in comic strips such as phzzz, hmmm and bzzz would be thus considered as wild, the similarly sounding fizz, hum and buzz would fall into the tame category.
Yet onomatopoeia cannot be coined completely accidentally. As Marchand (1959, p. 152–153) explains, “[t]heir composition is determined by the system of the language to which they belong which partly accounts for the differences of words for the same concept in different languages”. One such example is whisper, the equivalents of which is flüstern in German, suttog in Hungarian and susurro in Spanish. While all the examples are similar to one another by containing sibilants (and sibilants can imitate the rush of air), they are nonetheless different in other elements, since sound combinations of one language will not be permissible in another one (i.e., the sound combinations adhere to the general phonological skeleton of words). Thus, onomatopoeia are largely based on convention (just as language is), which is often underestimated in comparison to the perceived “natural link” that we are inclined to feel in the case of onomatopoeic words.
This overestimation of the “naturalness” of onomatopoeia resides in the fact that we become very used to our own language and do not have an objective view of it (Bredin 1996, p. 559). What happens, therefore, in the case of onomatopoeia is that speakers “actualize” various elements of the sound or how it is produced, making it “very difficult” (Adams 1973, p. 145) not to think of the sound that an onomatopoeic form is supposed to imitate on the one hand and the word form itself on the other hand as “essentially appropriate to each other” (ibid.). Thus, we might feel that onomatopoeic words such as buzz, crash or squeak are especially expressive, but on closer inspection they do not quite resemble the sound that they intend to denote. Speakers do, in fact, “hear” the sound that is represented by onomatopoeia, which thus presupposes a reciprocal relationship between language and how reality is conceptualized (Hrushovski 1980, p. 46).
This idea brings us to yet another crucial aspect of onomatopoeia. Once a word is linked to a particular sound, it immediately becomes a candidate for being considered as onomatopoeic; according to Bredin (1996, p. 559), regardless of the scale of resemblance between a sound and a word conventionally denoting it, we link the acoustical properties of the word to the sound. This way, onomatopoeia become self-fulfilling prophecies – we “hear” a particular sound associated with the word because of its meaning, offering us a means to interpret noises that otherwise we would not be able to (or would not be inclined to) interpret at all.