Onomatopoeia and metonymy

Address for correspondence
Réka Benczes
Institute of Communication and Sociology
Corvinus University of Budapest
Közraktár utca 4-6
H-1093 Budapest
Hungary
[e-mail]


Biographical notes
Réka Benczes is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Communication and Sociology, Corvinus University of Budapest. Her main areas of research are word-formation and linguistic creativity; the language of health and ageing; the social context of metaphorical motivation; and figurative framing in political communication. Her latest monograph, Rhyme Over Reason: Phonological Motivation in English, was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3481-8279


Lilla Petronella Szabó is Assistant Lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Sociology, Corvinus University of Budapest. Her main fields of interest are linguistics and political communication.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5509-2158

1 The present paper is partly based on Benczes (2019: Chapter 4).

2 Note, however, that even this list is not comprehensive. Flimsy (“Destitute of strength or solidity; easily destroyed; slight, frail, unsubstantial”) did not appear among the search results, even though the OED considers it as an “onomatopoeic formation” in the entry. A full list of onomatopoeic formations would probably require a thorough check of all the entries in the dictionary.

3 On the problem of distinguishing onomatopoeia from interjections, see Meinard (2015; cf. Körtvélyessy 2020).

4 Incidentally, boobook – the Australian English term for the spotted owl – is also listed as imitative by the OED.

5 Bird songs – or rather, what we think we hear as the sound that a bird makes – constitute a special case of onomatopoeia. Abelin (2011) analyzed English and Swedish “folk rhymes”, i.e., imitations of bird songs that also carry semantic content (typically associated with the bird), such as “Pleased to see you”, accredited as a “description” of what the rose finch “says” (these imitations of birdsong are referred to as “warblish” by Sarvasy [2016]). The folk rhymes come about as a result of folk etymology, whereby the salient sound properties that the bird produces are matched to high vs. low frequency and vibrant sounds. Words are selected primarily by virtue of their similarity in perceived sound structure to the bird’s call; content in this respect is only secondary.

6 Note that Körtvélyessy (2020, p. 516) overall questions the status of onomatopoeic forms as words. In her view, words that are motivated by or derived from the imitation of the sounds of an extra-lingustic reality can only be considered as “word-formation bases” for the creation of new complex words – which, however, are not onomatopoeic words.

7 And see also Newmeyer (1992, p. 757), who has claimed that “the number of pictorial, imitative, or onomatopoeic non-derived words in any language is vanishingly small”.

8 Similar definitions also crop up in the literature on onomatopoeia – see, for example Tsur’s (2001, n.p.): “[o]nomatopoeia is the imitation of natural noises by speech sounds”.
While it is generally agreed upon that an onomatopoeia designates a relationship between a sound and something else, the latter has been variously referred to as sense, referent, denotatum, etc. A further problem arises with regard to the nature of the relationship itself, which has been described by a whole host of verbs: imitates, resembles, echoes, reflects, sounds like, etc. (see Bredin, 1996, p. 555).

9 See also Assaneo et al. (2011) on the role of co-articulation in the knock and click onomatopoeia across languages.

10 “Representing the sound of a sneeze” (OED).

11 An onomatopoeia is often polysemous. This meaning extension can come about via both metonymy and metaphor; Akita (2013) claims that the latter is especially prominent in English (as compared to Japanese and Korean), in the case of onomatopoeic verbs. E.g.: the verb crunch in “The computer crunched the data” is an extended, metaphorical meaning of the basic, onomatopoeic form that imitates a harsh, grinding sound.

12 Example sentences are from Collins English Dictionary.

13 See Barcelona (2009) on the influence of metonymy on the construction of word forms.