The Semantics of Onomatopoeic Speech Act Verbs

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.