Creating a Lexico-Semantic Typology of Water-Related Onomatopoeic Interjections (On Russian and Finnish Material)

This article is concerned with onomatopoeic interjections that describe the visual and acoustic effects produced when a subject or object comes into contact with water or another liquid. The aim of the research was to establish the criteria for devising a typology of such onomatopoeic expressions. The research material consisted of water-related onomatopoeic interjections in Russian and Finnish. While it is well known that such words can be used as predicates in Russian, descriptions of Finnish grammar make no reference to this type of syntactic function. Since words belonging to this group are recorded and codified in Russian dictionaries, but not in Finnish ones, the authors employed different methods for each of the two languages in examining the lexical material. After establishing a codified inventory of water-related onomatopoeic interjections in Russian, the authors analysed their dictionary meanings, which enabled them to reduce the semantic content of the interjections to a set of prototypical ideas. On the basis of this analysis, the authors created a typology of water-related situations and established the criteria for identifying onomatopoeic synonymy. To compensate for the absence of dictionary data for Finnish onomatopoeic interjections, native speakers were asked to fill in electronic questionnaires in which their task was to complete descriptive utterances, to make acceptability judgements concerning the use of particular onomatopoeic expressions, and to pinpoint the essential features of the situation described. The data obtained for both languages were systematized in tabular form in accordance with the typology of water-related onomatopoeic interjections presented in this article. In contemporary Russian, the codified inventory of water-related onomatopoeic interjection consists of the following words: bultykh, bul' or bul'k, kap, nyrk (nyr'), plyukh, pshik, khlest' (khles'), khlyup, chmok, and shlep. Words used in a similar way in contemporary Finnish include the following: kohi, kuoh, liri, liti, lits, loiskis, loti, lati, lats, molskis, pirsk, plats, polskis, pori, pul(i), roiskis, and tip. It turned out that the major considerations influencing a speaker's choice of a suitable water-related onomatopoeic word include the following: (1) seriality: whether a sound (and, consequently, a word) is repeated; (2) the location at which the sound is produced, i.e. whether the object comes into contact with the surface of the liquid or with a deeper stratum; (3) the shape of the object that interacts with the liquid (flat or multidimensional); (4) the result of the interaction (whether or not complete immersion in the liquid takes place); and (5) the quality of the object's interaction with the liquid. Apart from comparisons between Finnish and Russian, this typology provides a framework for the contrastive analysis of water-related onomatopoeia in other languages as well.

Keywords

Authors

References