Onomatopoeias In Modern Chinese

Onomatopoeias are results of mimicking natural sounds. Most of them still have strong characteristic of sound imitation. But following the development of Chinese lexicology, part of onomatopoeias went through phonetic and semantic transformations.People are able to talk and write vividly about things, persons and natural phenomena with the help of onomatopoeia. Compared to non-onomatopoeias, onomatopoeias are direct descriptions of sounds which allow listeners to fully take in the vividness. Sentences containing onomatopoeias tend to be more rhetorically enhanced than those with regular adverbs.Chinese language has a rich set of onomatopoeias which are often used, in a broad range of usages. However, in the past, they did not get much attention they deserve and many times simply overlooked by scholars. The previous studies on onomatopoeia tend to focus on formal description and analysis on sentential level, often neglecting the semantics and pragmatics of onomatopoeia. This is precisely the reason why we need an overall, extensive analysis on onomatopoeia.First of all, we give out the definition of the so-called "phonetic symbol" in general linguistics and its status in linguistics. Secondly, based on the theory of linguistic symbols, the arbitrariness and similarity of onomatopoeia are studied.'The relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. ' This understanding of word formation has been widely accepted and is now believed to be an actual fact. Therefore some hypothesis and even linguistic phenomena which go against the idea of "linguistic arbitrariness" are often viewed as exceptions and out of ordinary. However, the findings of 'phonetic symbols' research and thorough investigation of linguistic corpus have provided the basis for our understanding that there actually exists the element for phonetic symbols in language that there is non-arbitrariness in language. Even though the onomatopoeia and its source sound may be different, we are still able to identify the actual sound through the linguistic expressionof the onomatopoeia. There exists certain similarity between onomatopoeia and its source sound. Onomatopoeias have similarity property and at the same time have arbitrariness of linguistic symbols and conventionality through common usage.The dissertation starts the investigation of onomatopoeia by categorizing onomatopoeia in Mandarin Chinese according to definitions and usages. We have established the corpus from the actual linguistic utterances and thereupon induced their pragmatic usages.This dissertation consists of eight chapters, and the summary of each chapter is given below:Chapter One is the introduction, explaining the purpose and significance of the present research. It contains the review of previous work on onomatopoeia, the object of study, research methodology and the sources of the linguistic corpus.Chapter Two investigates problems concerning definitions and part-of-speech problems of onomatopoeia: 1. introduction of how different languages define onomatopoeia in different ways, it explains onomatopoeia and similar terminology and differentiates onomatopoeias from vocal imitation. 2. Review of the previous research on the problems of onomatopoeia. 3. Inquiry into the classification of onomatopoeia based on its syntactical functions. This section is dedicated to the detailed study of part-of-speech problems from the point of grammatical functions. It also attempts at solving problems concerning functional or notional words of onomatopoeias, differentiating them from adjectives, adverbs, modal particles and interjections. 4. Investigation of part-of-speech problems of onomatopoeia based on their semantics.Chapter Three studies symbolic quality of Chinese onomatopoeia: it first deals with signifiant and signifie and whether onomatopoeias have conceptual quality. It then compares onomatopoeias from phonetic similarities and looks into the relationship between the language origin and onomatopoeia. On the basis of 'phonetic symbolism, ' the definition of 'phonetic symbol' in general linguistics is given and its status and purpose in linguistics; next, on the basis of 'language symbolism, ' the arbitrariness and similarity of onomatopoeia are studied.Chapter Four deals with the classification of onomatopoeias in Chinese: Chinese onomatopoeias can be classified depending on the differences of linguistic structures or objects of the expressions. On these two methods of classification, we categorized onomatopoeias. This chapter only deals with the classification by the second method; we will look into the other classification in chapter 5, section 2. Chinese onomatopoeias can be classified according to the different objects of description, such as people-related, animal-related, natural phenomenon-related and things-related onomatopoeias. Chinese onomatopoeia is a word-assembly which is an open category in a sense that it does not consist of one-on-one relationships between an onomatopoeia word and its meaning. Polysemy is easily found. Therefore it might seem like onomatopoeia and its source do not have a fixed establishment, but when investigating a language, one needs to have a basic frame. The purpose of classification lies on the presenting the structural models and the actual usages of onomatopoeia which are the fundamental research material of present study.Chapter Five studies the characteristics of onomatopoeia in Chinese: different relationships of collocation between words can influence the different actualization at the sentential level. Selection of collocation can be of syntactical, symbolic or phonetic. This chapter carries out the investigation of onomatopoeia in different linguistic dimensions such as syntax, phonetics and semantic.Chapter Six studies the usages of Chinese onomatopoeia: Mimicking of sounds is a universal rhetoric phenomenon. It describes the movement, image or condition of certain sounds and has affluent metaphorical effect which helps people to fully grasp the sense of movement and music. This chapter studies onomatopoeia from the point of rhetoric: it inquires into relationships of onomatopoeia and rhetoric, onomatopoeia and style in the process of linguistic application. It also looks at the usages of onomatopoeia in various Chinese dialects.Chapter Seven studies the application of Chinese onomatopoeia in the linguistic environment: Chapter Six studies rhetorical facet of onomatopoeia, this chapter concentrates on the study of onomatopoeia and its expressions in practical linguistic usages such as literature, child language,advertisement language, internet language.Chapter Eight studies the developmental tendency of onomatopoeia: this chapter continues the investigation of Chapter 7 on the actual usages of Chinese onomatopoeia on its developmental tendency. This study, based on lexicology, involves new-formed words, import of foreign onomatopoeias, various expressions of onomatopoeia, polysemy of onomatopoeia, etc. Next we look at canonical problems of onomatopoeia on its markedness, word formation and usage.Chapter Nine concludes the dissertation with summary of main discussions of present work and makes suggestions of topics that need further study in the future.Relying on the corpus made up of actual usages of onomatopoeia, we have analyzed onomatopoeia in Chinese language. In doing so, we were able to make the generalizations of Chinese on the one hand and present characteristics particular to Chinese on the other, making it possible to give overall account of Chinese onomatopoeia on structural, formational, syntactical, lexical, and semantic levels.This dissertation adopts descriptive analysis from different field of linguistics such as phonetics, semantics, syntax, and rhetoric to study onomatopoeia.