The Use of Onomatopoeic Interjections in Predicate Function in Russian and Other Languages: A Perspective from the Corpus of Parallel Texts of the Russian National Corpus

Abstract

Onomatopoeic interjections (words such as the Russian bac and tjap and their English equivalents bang and pow) are not only used to imitate sounds. Russian linguistics has long acknowledged their use in predicate function instead of verb forms (for example, bac ego po lbu 'bang (interjection) him on the forehead'), but similar use is not widely reported for other languages. Instead of using the intuition of native speakers to test the possibility of this construction in different languages, we test the usefulness of a parallel corpus for such linguistic purposes.This study uses six different bilingual corpora and the multilingual Corpus of Parallel Texts of the Russian National Corpus to investigate the possibility of such uses as well as the meaning components involved and thus explicated in the translations. We conclude that predicate function seems to be a feature very characteristic of Russian, but it occurs in other languages as well. In translations from or into Russian, where Russian uses an onomatopoeic interjection in predicate function, the other language tends to use a verb, a combination of an interjection and a verb, or finds fit to explicate the deliberately ambiguous but very expressive Russian meaning in other ways.

Suomen veden ääniin liittyvien imitatiivien vakiintuneisuus erityyppisten aineistojen pohjalta

“…Laajemmin imitatiiveja voidaan käyttää myös silloin, kun tilanteeseen ei edes kuvitella ääntä: esimerkiksi sopivat kovia äkillisiä ääniä kuvaavat sanat (suomessa esim. pam, ta-daa) kuvattaessa metaforisesti tai metonyymisesti yllättäviä, ääneen liittymättömiä reaktioita (Jääskeläinen 2013;Viimaranta-Vihervä 2019).…”

Eye movements unveil sensitivity of naïve listeners to iconicity of Russian onomatopoeic words

“…Traditionally, these linguistic units are simultaneously attributed to interjections and onomatopoeias (Karcevskij, 1984;Švedova, 1980I, § 1700 or even to special deverbal formations derived from verbs (Nikitina, 2012). They have been labelled as "verbal-interjectional forms" that have onomatopoeic qualities (Mchitar′jan, 2016;Prokopovič, 1969;Xvostunova, 2000), "onomatopoeic interjections" that often function as predicates (Viimaranta & Vihervä, 2019), "verboids" that are also onomatopoeic (Nikitina, 2012) or "onomatopoeic verbal interjections" that combine all three features (Kanerva, 2018), mostly due to their unique capacity to capture auditory aspects of various events and actions. Despite the variability of views on how to label them, there is a consensus among scholars that Russian words such as bac, pyx, and ščelk are instances of form-meaning iconicity that are used for depiction of various sounds and indication of action causing these sounds (cf.…”