Onomatopoeic vocabulary: morphological features (based on the material of the Russian, English, and French languages)

The subject of the study is the morphological features of sound-imitating vocabulary (onomatopoeia) in structurally different languages – Russian, English, and French. The object of the study consists of sound-imitating words selected from lexicographic sources and text corpora of the specified languages. The authors examine the history of research on this vocabulary in the works of domestic and foreign linguists, the issues of the motivation of the linguistic sign, as well as the controversial status of onomatopoeia in the language system, their relationship with interjections, and their connection to sound symbolism. Special attention is given to the determination of the part-of-speech belonging of sound imitations, the analysis of their semantic groups (linguophonations, zoophonations, anthropophonations, etc.), and classification by sound sources. The paper also investigates the ability of sound-imitating bases to serve as a foundation for the formation of new words and their integration into the grammatical system of each of the compared languages. The methodological foundation of the research comprises descriptive and comparative methods, as well as quantitative analysis. The authors use techniques of word formation and morphological analysis to identify productive models of onomatopoeia formation. The material for the analysis consists of data from electronic dictionaries (Ozhеgov, Dal, Ushakov, Oxford English Dictionary, LaRousse) and web corpora of texts (Multran, Araneum, Russicum, Anglicum, Francogallicum). The scientific novelty of the research lies in the comprehensive comparative analysis of the word-formation potential of sound-imitating vocabulary across three languages based on a unified methodological framework with the involvement of corpus data. Unlike many works that focus on the phonetic aspect, this research reveals patterns of the transition of onomatopoeia into significant parts of speech and the specificity of their further formation. The main conclusions of the conducted research are as follows: in all three languages, the core of sound-imitating vocabulary consists of interjections and the verbs and nouns derived from them, which is determined by their semantics (denoting sound, action, and process). The quantitative distribution of parts of speech differs: in the Russian language, due to its synthetic structure, verbs and nouns derived from them with rich affixation dominate; in the analytic English and French languages, nouns prevail. A significant contribution of the authors is the demonstration that the word-formation possibilities of onomatopoeia directly correlate with the grammatical structure of the language.