A Comparative Study Of Onomatopoeia In Chinese, Japanese And English

Onomatopoeias are words which imitate the sounds they represent. Although onomatopoeias in quantity are not many, they play a very important role in languages. Currently there is relatively little and insignificant research on onomatopoeias, especially on contrastive studies of onomatopoeias between different languages.This paper looks at the present research situation and adopts statistical analytical methods to make comprehensive research on the pragmatics of onomatopoeia in Chinese, Japanese and English. The comparative analytical study is based on the onomatopoeias which appear in the English novel,"Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"and its translated Chinese and Japanese versions.It also makes a comparative analysis of structural forms, syntactic functions, semantic and pragmatic features of onomatopoeias in the three languages in order to find out their characteristics, similarities and differences and their associated reasons. From the study we are able to gain a profound understanding of various factors of these three languages and cultures which are related to onomatopoeia. It also provides some useful information for Japanese people studying Chinese and for foreigners studying Japanese and English through onomatopoeias.