The Significance of Onomatopoeia in Languagization: From the perspective of sound-meaning relationship under dynamic system principle

Abstract

： Onomatopoeia acts as the first step of linguistic expression, and is an important sign of quasi-language evolving into real language (i.e. languagization). It may gradually lose its onomatopoeic characteristics as it is adapted to the systematicity of language. As a primitive word class, typical onomatopoeia is inevitably constrained by language system in many aspects, while still maintaining its deeper nature beyond the system. Many non-onomatopoeias still carry onomatemes to various degree and manners, among which the imitation of all human sounds and some sounds of external world possess a linguistic universality. Various factors such as the equivalent selectivity, versatility and the variability of onomatopoeias keep interacting and make the whole vocabulary system be chaotic. The model of onomatopoeia structures can be deemed as an imitative target or a structural meme of other models of non-onomatopoeia structures. This paper mainly aims at demonstrating how onomatopoeias assist language in becoming systematic, and how they are constrained by general knowledge and existing language foundations.