This paper considers such expressive words in Russian as onomatopoeic verbal interjections (bukh ‘bang’, stuk ‘knock’, bul’ ‘plop’). First of all, it focuses on the reasons for using those words. This study suggests that native speakers of Russian may deliberately prefer those linguistic units over words from other classes (nouns, verbs or adverbs). It happens when such factors as Zipf’s law and the principles of iconicity and economy in grammar come into play. Secondly, the article claims that while morphologically simple, syntactically mobile and with transparent onomatopoeia-based meaning, those words are not that primitive. Onomatopoeic verbal interjections are capable of conveying multiple shades of meaning due to such diachronic processes as lexical shifts and extensions they have undergone. That kind of qualities enable speakers to imply more than they want to explicitly utter under certain conditions. And finally, using corpus data the research distinguishes such pragmatic functions of those linguistic units (bukh ‘bang’, stuk ‘knock’, bul’ ‘plop’) as quasi-referential, emotive, phatic, poetic and metalinguistic function.

This article considers Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections due to the fact that these linguistic units possess a unique grammatical feature of being either completely syntactically independent or act as members of sentence, depending on the context and speaker’s communicative intention. Moreover, there is ambiguity concerning their expressiveness. In some cases they are prosodically foregrounded and have reduplicated morphemes, in others no pauses in speech separate them from the host construction and no expressive morphology is demonstrated. This research aims at establishing correlation between prosodic/morphological expressiveness and syntactic independence of Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections with the help of a statistical model. Firstly, corpus analysis of data from the Russian Corpus of Spoken Language is applied examine expressiveness of these linguistic units, as well as to investigate their syntactic independence. Finally, a Log-Linear Statistical Model is applied to establish dependencies between absence/presence of these three features and to determine which ones of them have significant correlations.

Описан лингвистический эксперимент на основе субститутивного теста, цель которого-установить синтаксические функции звукоподражательных глагольных междометий «бац», «плюх» и «звяк» в предложении. Количественный анализ корпусных данных показывает частоту употребления знаков препинания после данных языковых единиц. Функционально-семантический анализ контекстов, отобранных для эксперимента, демонстрирует то, что пунктуация служит маркером синтаксических функций рассматриваемых междометий. Ключевые слова: звукоподражательные глагольные междометия, пунктуация, синтаксические функции, русский язык, лингвистические методы. Введение До настоящего момента функции звукоподражательных глагольных

The paper proposes a brief overview of tendencies in pragmatics (evolution of sign perception as a dyadic::triadic::quadratic entity; its interpretation not as a static, but dynamic, discourse bound phenomenon, analysis of Peirce’s views on sources of rational explanation), paying major attention to Apel’s distinctive philosophical approach, known as transcendental pragmatics, its congeniality with general principles of hermeneutics and potentials of its application in linguistics.

We investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different types of cues that affect the elicitation of associations. In the Facilitating cluster, associations were mostly correct; in the Counteracting cluster, they were predominantly incorrect. Worthy of note, many of the incorrect associations were systematic. In the Mixed cluster, there was a combination of cues; and in the Undefined cluster, no discrete cues affecting the formation of common associations were found. In Experiment 2, the same stimulus words were used in an eye-tracking experiment using visual world paradigm. It was shown that the participants have even better chances to map the onomatopoeic words to the correct semantic domain when extralinguistic information is available, in this case target images presented on the experimental display. The availability of both audio and visual inputs substantially boosted this process in all four clusters. Our findings support the view that imitative sound symbolism offers a scaffolding material for connecting onomatopoeias to their referents when words are pronounced in isolation. Cross-linguistic sound symbolism offers a good explanation to the presence of different cues that affect semantic recognition of unknown onomatopoeic words. On a larger scale, cross-linguistic similarities in onomatopoeias may be part of a broader phenomenon, universal sound symbolism, form-meaning mapping shared by a wide array of languages.