Abstract
Having focused on the non-verbal aspect of onomatopoeia in Chap. 3, this chapter will focus on the lexical aspect. A range of examples will be analysed in terms of the notions developed in relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics. It will be argued that what appears to be the polysemous nature of onomatopoeia is a result of lexical modification and ad hoc concept formation in particular. This account also provides an explanatory framework for the context dependency of onomatopoeia, as well as the division of labour between semantic and pragmatic aspects of onomatopoeia, explaining the process by which onomatopoeia’s lexical concepts are often modified in a specific context. The modification of concepts is guided by the search for optimal relevance. The implication of this is that onomatopoeia are not polysemous and what appears to be the lexical elusiveness of onomatopoeia is a result of pragmatic processing. It will be further argued that onomatopoeia is a property where linguistic forms are used by virtue of their resemblance to the speaker’s cognitive experience. That is, the property of onomatopoeia is the human capacity to entertain the perceptual resemblance between their cognitive experience and any tool they can use as a communicative stimulus.
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Notes
- 1.
Tsujimura (2001) questions Kita’s claim based on such evidence. See the next section for a review of her analysis.
- 2.
Kita is not the first scholar to touch on the distinction between “feeling” a feeling and actually experiencing a feeling. It is often discussed in Japanese linguistics that onomatopoeia allows for the reexperiencing of vicarious experience.
- 3.
See Wilson (2011) for a detailed discussion of the parallels in and differences between relevance theory and cognitive linguistics in the treatment of metaphor.
- 4.
In relevance theory, pragmatics and semantics are also considered as parallel, but not as independent of each other. In relevance theory, the comprehension process is seen as mutual parallel adjustment, in that “hypotheses about explicatures, implicated premises and implicated conclusions are developed in parallel against a background of expectations (or anticipatory hypotheses) which may be revised or elaborated as the utterance unfolds” (Wilson and Sperber 2002, 261–262).
- 5.
https://cookpad.com/recipe/2684995 Accessed 12 May 2019.
- 6.
https://beauty.hotpepper.jp/slnH000231469/style/L003653319.html. Accessed 12 May 2019.
- 7.
I am grateful for Kate Scott for suggesting these examples.
- 8.
https://eiga.com/news/20051129/1/. Accessed 12 May 2019.
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Sasamoto, R. (2019). Semantics and Pragmatics of Onomatopoeia. In: Onomatopoeia and Relevance. Palgrave Studies in Sound. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26318-8_4
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