Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences / Onomatopoeia and Regular Sound Changes

Full text (.pdf)
Issue
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2022 15 (10)
Authors
Flaksman, Maria A.
Contact information
Flaksman, Maria A.: Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University «LETI» 5 Professora Popova Str., St. Petersburg, 197376, Russia;
Keywords
onomatopoeia; regular sound changes; diachronic linguistics; iconicity; sound symbolism; etymology; phonosemantics
Abstract

The article deals with the problem of diachronic development of onomatopoeic lexicon and discusses how regular sound changes affect imitative words. The classification according to the degrees of the impact of regular sound changes is devised and applied to the bulk of English sound-imitative words. The aim of the article is to establish which regular sound changes of the English language had the most detrimental effect. In order to achieve this aim, all major English regular sound changes are classified into phonosemantically significant and phonosemantically insignificant. This classification is based on the use of methods of historical-comparative linguistics and etymological analysis. The main result is the revelation of the fact that not all regular sound changes are equally detrimental to the iconic lexicon of a language. They are only so if: 1) touch upon salient, meaning-bearing phonemes of an iconic word; 2) change the original phonotype of a phoneme; and 3) take place when the word still retains its original sound-meaning coherence. The devised classification is potentially universal and applicable to the onomatopoeic lexicons of related and unrelated languages

Pages
1508–1515
DOI
10.17516/1997-1370-0351
Paper at repository of SibFU
https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/109139

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