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Crash! Bam! Fizz!: Onomatopoeia
Transcript
The black sheep of the English Linguistics community
An Introduction to the Most Loathed Word in English Spelling Bees
BOTTOM LINE: ONOMATOPOEIA OCCUPY MANY SPEECH CATEGORIES!
Holy Onomatopoeia, Batman!
Crash, Bam, Fizz!
Onomatopoeia in English
Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism
POW!
FIZZ!
An Application to Robert Bridges's "London Snow"
When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
CRASH!
Sound symbolism in English
High front spread vowels, combined with the voiceless stops p, t, and k seem to suggest angular, pointed shapes. They are harsh sounding.
Rounded back vowels (and diphthongs), combined with nasals, liquids, semivowels y and w, and even voiced stops like b, suggest soft, rounded, even heavy, shapes (Harrison 2001).
Note: Liquids include l, r, and other laterals like velarized alveolar lateral approximant "dark l".
The Case for Sound Symbolism - an Experiment
Words with onomatopoetic origins:
- Bump
- Push
- Jump
- Touch
- Murmur
Onomatopoeia Defined
From the Ancient Greek "onomatopoiia", "the coining of a word in imitation of a sound".
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the formation of words imitative of sound" or "the formation of a word from sound".
It also refers to onomatopoetic words, and the use of onomatopoetic devices.
BOTTOM LINE: ONOMATOPOEIA OCCUPY MANY SPEECH CATEGORIES!
An Alternate Definition for Onomatopoeia
Expands to include sound symbolism and phonoaesthesia in general.
Be honest - what is sound symbolism?
The theory of sound symbolism posits that there are meaningful, significant exceptions to the traditional idea that a word's shape is definied exclusively by its meaning.
It is the phenomenon where "native speakers feel that there is some kind of meaningful connection between a sound...and properties of the outside world" (Crystal 2004).
SPOILER: Especially useful for analyzing poetry.
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled - marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;
No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,
And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.
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