The Use of Onomatopoeic Interjections in Predicate Function in Russian and Other Languages: A Perspective from the Corpus of Parallel Texts of the Russian National Corpus

ABSTRACT

Onomatopoeic interjections (words such as the Russian bac and tjap and their English equivalents bang and pow) are not only used to imitate sounds. Russian linguistics has long acknowledged their use in predicate function instead of verb forms (for example, bac ego po lbu ‘bang (interjection) him on the forehead’), but similar use is not widely reported for other languages. Instead of using the intuition of native speakers to test the possibility of this construction in different languages, we test the usefulness of a parallel corpus for such linguistic purposes.

This study uses six different bilingual corpora and the multilingual Corpus of Parallel Texts of the Russian National Corpus to investigate the possibility of such uses as well as the meaning components involved and thus explicated in the translations. We conclude that predicate function seems to be a feature very characteristic of Russian, but it occurs in other languages as well. In translations from or into Russian, where Russian uses an onomatopoeic interjection in predicate function, the other language tends to use a verb, a combination of an interjection and a verb, or finds fit to explicate the deliberately ambiguous but very expressive Russian meaning in other ways.

KEYWORDS:

• onomatopoeia
• interjection
• predicate
• Russian
• Slavic
• Russian National Corpus
• parallel corpora

ORCID

Johanna Viimaranta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9640-3394

Notes

1 This information is based on our observations but is consistent with information in (Jääskeläinen 2013, 341, Nikitina 2012, 179) and in other works cited in them.

2 The originals for the texts and the languages of the translations in the corpus are the following: Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code (original English: translations: Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian); Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (original: English; translations: German, Dutch, Swedish, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian); Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (original: English; translations: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovene, Bulgarian); Paulo Coelho. O Alquimista (original: Portuguese; translations: English, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Bulgarian); Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio (original: Italian; translations: Latin, French, English, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Macedonian); Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles (original: English; translations: French, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian); A. A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (original: English; translations: German, Dutch, Latin, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Upper Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian); Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Le petit prince (original: French; translations: Latin, Italian, Romanian, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian); Mihail Bulgakov. Master i Margarita (original: Russian; translations: Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, English, Dutch, French, Italian).

3 E.g. (Ge) Und er geht so auf den Alten zu, und auf einmal, plumps, liegt er ihm zu Füßen. Cf (Ru) Подходит таким манерам к старичку – хлоп в ноги. (L.N. Tolstoj. Vojna I mir (tom 4) (1865–1869)). In the German variant the interjection is used merely to add information to the verb (and the whole text), whereas in the Russian it functions as predicate. Also, on many occasions in our data, when Russian uses an onomatopoeic interjection as predicate, German uses an onomatopoeic verb instead.

4 The Russian translation of Nabokov’s book of memoirs is by S. Il′in (1999). A broadly equivalent sentence in Nabokov’s own Russian words is to be found in his Drugie berega (1954) and also contains the interjection tyk in predicate function: Я уже упоминал о довольно строгонькой мисс Клэйтон, Виктории Артуровне: бывало, разваливаюсь или горблюсь, а она тык меня костяшками руки в поясницу, или еще сама противно расправит и выгнет стан, показывая, значит, как надобно держаться.

5 The grammatical interpretation of swish and smack in this construction is open to debate. The exclamation mark suggests that they should be treated as either imperatives or interjections, despite the indefinite article (cf. “with a swish and a smack,” where they would certainly count as nouns).