The Semantics of Onomatopoeic Speech Act Verbs

The Semantics of Onomatopoeic Speech Act Verbs I-Ni Tsai Institute of Linguistics (Preparatory Office), Academia Sinica No. 128 Academic Sinica Road, Sec 2. Nangkang, Taipei 115, Taiwan initsai@gate.sinica.edu.tw Chu-Ren Huang Institute of Linguistics (Preparatory Office), Academia Sinica No. 128 Academic Sinica Road, Sec 2. Nangkang, Taipei 115, Taiwan churen@gate.sinica.edu.tw Abstract This paper attempts to explore the semantics of onomatopoeic speech act verbs. Language abounds with small bits of utterances to show speaker's emotions, to maintain the flow of speech and to do some daily exchange routines. These tiny vocalizations have been regarded as vocal gestures and largely studied under the framework of 'interjection'. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the perlocutionary force the vocal tokens contain. We describe their conventionalized lexical meaning and term them as onomatopoeic speech act verb. An onomatopoeic speech act verb refers to a syntactically independent monomorphemic utterance which performs illocutionary or perlocutionary forces. It is normally directed at the listener, which making the recipient to do something or to solicit recipient's response or reaction. They are onomatopoeic because most of them are imitation of the sounds produced by doing some actions. 1� Introduction Based on the Speech Act Theory (Austin 1992; Reiss 1985; Searle 1969, 1975, 1979), speech act is what speaker performs when producing the utterance. Researchers suggest that speech act is not only an utterance act but contains the perlocutionary force. If the speaker has some particular intention when making the utterance such as committing to doing something or expressing attitude or emotions, the speech act is said to contain illocutionary force. On the other hand, if the utterance has a particular effect on the addressee, the utterance is regarded to contain perlocutionary force. In addition to the familiar speech act verbs, we suggest that speech act can also be carried out by a group of syntactically independent small vocalizations. Since they are imitations of sound generated by certain actions, we describe them as 'onomatopoeic speech act verb'. Example (1) illustrates this kind of verb: (0 1A: g !� ei�! II ge hey brother B: Tfl? II sheme shi what thing A: fES #134V1WINfEllY7 ° ni kan nabian you� ge kanxingde you look there there is CL2 foutune-teller A: Hey. 1 Some of the exmaples used in this paper are extracted from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. Sinica Corpus consists of both written and spoken data. Please find Sinica Corpus at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/SinicaCorpus/ Some conventions are used in this paper. PN= proper noun; FP= final particle; CL= classifier 174 B: What? A: Look, there is a fortune teller there. In example (1), speaker A uses t (ei) 'hey' to attract B's attention. When B responds, A continues to say what s/he intends to say. As the example demonstrates, when A utters the word t (ei) 'hey', s/he not only performs the utterance act but performs a perlocutionary act. This word will bring about effects on the audience, i.e. to make the audience pay attention to the speaker. This paper attempts …

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