Functional motivation of punctuation with onomatopoeic verbal interjections

Russian onomatopoeic interjections and their grammatical functions have not yet been described on the basis of large empirical materials or experimental methods, and the peculiarities in the use of punctuation with them has not been studied at all. The article presents findings of a linguistic substitution test of onomatopoeic verbal interjections with verbs, nouns, adverbs or syntactic clauses depending on the context of the sentences, which are offered as stimulus material. The result of the experiment makes it possible to demonstrate correlation between syntactic functions of verbal onomatopoeic interjections and the punctuation marks used with them. The significance of the article lies in a systematic attempt to find principles of punctuation usage in connection with onomatopoeic verbal interjections. The Russian interjections "bats", "plyukh" and "zvyak" are used as examples. The research aims to identify the syntactic functions of these linguistic signs and to determine how the use of punctuation marks correlates with these functions. The methodological framework consists of three kinds of research methods. The first of these is quantitative corpus analysis of data from the Russian National Corpus, which demonstrates the frequency of punctuation marks in connection with the onomatopoeic verbal interjections under consideration. The second method involves a linguistic experiment based on an open-ended substitution questionnaire. There were 30 respondents, all of whom were native speakers of Russian, divided into three groups of ten. The stimulus material consisted of 30 sentences taken from the National Corpus. These sentences are used as illustrative material for the article. The aim of the substitution test was to investigate the syntagmatic relationship of "bats", "plyukh", and "zvyak" to other classes of words, as well as the syntactic functions of these onomatopoeic verbal interjections in a sentence. The third research method involved semantic/functional analysis of selected contexts with the aim of establishing correlations between the functions of these linguistic units and the use of punctuation. The research results show that verbal onomatopoeic interjections are able to fulfil the syntactic functions of predicate, subject, direct object, and adverbial modifier. They may also be semantically equivalent to a complete syntactic unit. Punctuation serves as a marker of these functions. The article contains 2 tables, 22 reference sources, and 30 illustrative examples from the Russian National Corpus.

Keywords

Authors

References