<p>The focus of this essay is on examining the meanings of the <em>onomatopoeia</em> (sound imitating words) <em>snap, crack</em> and <em>pop</em>. Previous studies on onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are used to define the terms and create a model for an alternative categorization of these meanings. This model is then applied in a corpus study, conducted on the COCA (Corpus Of Contemporary American English) and BYU-BNC (The British National Corpus) corpora, to find a way to more accurately describe the meanings and functions of these words. For this purpose the context in which <em>snap, crack</em> and<em> pop</em> are used is also addressed by observing how frequently they occur in formal and informal texts and which adjectives and adverbs frequently modify them. In the study it was discovered that these three words took on many different meanings that would be hard to list separately in a dictionary. These meanings did follow a pattern linked to the properties associated with the word. The study found <em>snap, crack and pop</em> to be informal words with a tendency to add emotion or effect to a statement. It is therefore concluded that sorting onomatopoeia by sound and non sound-related meaning and describing the informal characteristics of these words leads to a greater understanding of how they are used.</p><p> </p><p>Keywords: Arbitrariness, <em>crack</em>, emotive, ideophones, mimetics, mimes, non-arbitrariness, onomatopoeia, phenomimes, phonomimes, <em>pop</em>, psychomimes, register, semantics, <em>snap</em>, sound symbolism and style.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:vxu-7159 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Rydblom, Oskar |
| Publisher | Linnaeus University, School of Language and Literature |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
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