Biolinguistic Approach To The Syntax Of Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia,prevailing in all natural languages including English and Chinese,constitutes a subset of words that phonetically imitates,resembles or suggests the sounds around the world that they describe.The status of onomatopoeia in linguistic field is far lower than the other basic word classes,which has occupied a subsidiary position for fairly a long time.Recent years,however,have witnessed that linguists and scholars have increasingly concentrated their attention to onomatopoeia with a number of researches majorly related to its classification,rhetorical function,cognitive features and syntactic behavior,which have already yielded fruitful results.Among all of these achievements,the researches on the syntactic behavior of onomatopoeia are mainly based on the comparison between English and Chinese onomatopoeia,and it has already been discovered that these two have different syntactic features,which precisely lies in that English onomatopoeia often acts as the subject,the predicate or the object in the sentence,whereas Chinese onomatopoeia aptly serves as the attribute or the adverbial in the sentence.Hence,it can be obviously noted that compared with English onomatopoeia,Chinese onomatopoeia holds a narrow competence in participating in syntax.In addition,the occurrence of onomatopoeia as an independent constituent,which lacks the competence of participating in syntactic structure,can be discovered in both of the two languages.However,previous studies have not made a profound exploration or reasonable explanation on the reasons why onomatopoeia embraces such two distinct syntactic representations as well as the differences in the competence of participating in syntax between two languages.On that account,this paper aims to investigate the conceptual motivation underlying different syntactic representations of onomatopoeia in terms of “self-designation” and “transferred-designation” as well as obtain the typological implications from the biolinguistic approach with the aid of the methods of qualitative analysis integrated with quantitative analysis.Biolinguistics is a newly developed frontier interdisciplinary subject which combines biology and linguistics,the first and driving impulse of which is to investigate the biological nature of language.A growing number of linguistic researchers have so far taken a large step forward in examining language from the perspective of biological evolution,and expect to find out the traces of language evolution.This paper exactly endeavors to offer the converging evidence towards the course of human language development and evolution by the syntactic study on onomatopoeia from the biolinguistic perspective.Specifically speaking,under the biolinguistic approach,this paper begins with the classification of onomatopoeia into self-designated onomatopoeia and transferred-designated onomatopoeia.We argue that it is the distinction between “self-designation” and “transferred-designation” that can partially determine different competence of participating in syntactic operation.Onomatopoeia used for self-designation is on the basis of iconicity between the “signifier”(phonetic form)and the “signified”(sound),which occurs when its phonetic form represents the sound itself in natural world.Onomatopoeia used for transferred-designation,taking “metonymy” as its internal cognitive mechanism,is based on the principle of contiguity,which occurs when its phonetic form symbolizes what is related to the sound rather than the sound per se.,such as the source of sound,the result,the manner,the degree and the action that produces the sound,etc.Subsequently,based on these two contrasting usages of onomatopoeia,this paper describes and illustrates the syntactic behaviors of onomatopoeia from the biolinguistic perspective.We argue that self-designated onomatopoeia which acts as an independent element or sentence is characteristic of syntactic structure independency,thus showing a narrow competence in participating in syntactic operation by means of “merging”.Transferred-designated onomatopoeia,on the contrary,is characteristic of syntactic structure dependency,which commonly serves as the subject,the predicate,the object,the attribute or the adverbial in the sentence,thereby displaying a stronger competence in participating in syntactic merge operation.We may further wonder why there exists such a distinction between “self-designation” and “transferred-designation” within onomatopoeia as well as the corresponding two different syntactic structures.This paper further explores the reason from the functional perspective under the biolinguistic approach.According to Popper,there are four language communicative functions,successively from the lower-level to the higher-level named: the expressive function,the signalling function,the descriptive function and the argumentative function.Self-designated onomatopoeia frequently and largely serves the expressive function and the signalling function,but with rarely the descriptive function and the argumentative function,which is strikingly contrast to transferred-designated onomatopoeia which lays more emphasis on the descriptive function and the argumentative function while still entertains the expressive function and the signalling function.Because of different commutative functions that onomatopoeia fulfills,onomatopoeia can be discovered to possess self-designated meaning and transferred-designated meaning,and accordingly their syntactic structures exhibit utterly the opposite.In this paper,onomatopoeia,semantically from “self-designation” to “transferred-designation”,syntactically from “structure independency” to “structure dependency”,functionally from “lower-level communicative functions” to “higher-level communicative functions”,all echo the biolinguistic tenet on “language evolution and development”,and demonstrates the dynamic evolution of language from the “primitive language” to “mature language”.Moreover,this paper might be of great typological significance,which points out that although the distinction between “self-designation” and “transferred-designation” in onomatopoeia can be captured in all natural languages,the distribution of the two options in a particular language is not always even.We propose that Chinese is a self-designated onomatopoeia dominant language,whereas English is a transferred-designated onomatopoeia dominant language.