| This thesis focuses on onomatopoeia in pirate fiction from linguistic perspective.In English word class system,onomatopoeia do not exist alone to play as an independent part of speech?Their forms,pronunciations,grammars and semantics are all different from other kinds of words.Qualitative and quantitative methods have both been adopted in this thesis.Firstly,10 pieces of pirate fictions of different lengths have been downloaded from an authoritative English novel website:Gutenberg to establish a pirate fiction corpus around 500000 words.Secondly,all of the onomatopoeias will be searched from the book English Onomatopoeia Dictionary through the software Antconc and divided into living creature-related and natural world-related according to their meaning and usage.Thirdly,they will be analyzed systematically from the three linguistic aspects:phonetics,syntax and semantics.This study finds that pirate fiction,as an important branch of maritime literature,has its unique style that endowed with both professional maritime vocabulary and large amounts of onomatopoeias.These onomatopoeias have their specific features in phonetic,syntax and semantics.In living creature-related onomatopoeia,long vowels and diphthongs take a large percent,while in natural world-related onomatopoeia,short vowels are in the majority.In addition,verb has the highest frequency among all parts of speech and interjection plays an important role in pirate slang words.Apart from the onomatopoeias for describing pirates,those onomatopoeic words about weather,pcean,sailing ship,as well as different kinds of appliances onboard in the early age of sail also take up a large proportion.Although there is no lack of research on pirate fiction at home and abroad,those researches made from linguistic perspective especially from the perspective of onomatopoeia are rarely seen.It is hoped that this thesis can increase people's interest in pirate fiction and promote the development of maritime literature. |
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