A Comparative Study Of Onomatopoeia In English Japanese And Chinese Based On Life Of Pi

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.In accordance with the current research of onomatopoeia and mimetic words, the author, with the text of onomatopoetia appearing in the original English novel Life of Pi and in the Chinese and Japanese translations, conducts a comprehensive and comparative analysis of onomatopoeias in Chinese, Japanese and English by the use of statistical analysis method and also makes a comprehensive and systematic research on the usage of them.At the same time, the author analyzes and compares the structure, syntactic function, semantic feature and pragmatic characteristics comprehensively. The purpose of the detailed analysis is to find out the characteristics, similarities and differences and the cause of the similarities and differences of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in Chinese, Japanese, English, and thus make readers have a more profound understanding of the onomatopoeia and mimetic words on such factors as language and culture.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a general introduction to the whole study, which covers the starting point, the significance, and the purpose of the thesis. Chapter two reviews studies on onomatopoeia already conducted both at home and abroad and also gives a brief introduction of the novel Life of Pi. Chapter three respectively generalizes the definition of onomatopoeia in English, Japanese and Chinese, points out the object and range of the study, and introduces the major research methods. Chapter four is the main body of the thesis. The author carries out a detailed and comparative study of onomatopoeia in English, Japanese and Chinese from the four perspectives of structural forms, syntactic functions, semantic features and translation methods, and then conducts a statistic analysis by means of mathematical statistics. In chapter five, the author draws the conclusion and explains the value of the study.