The paper examines the entries of 36 words for common animal sounds in two online English dictionaries, Cambridge Dictionaries and The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, to see what information is provided in the entries. Previous work on English dictionaries has focused on meaning explanations of referential, arbitrary words. With the examination of onomatopoeic words for animal sounds, this paper expands the field beyond the study of arbitrary words and into words whose forms contribute to their meaning.

The results show that there are no consistent policies for how words for animal sounds are handled, or how the animal readings are separated from other possible meanings of the words. There is variation in how explicitly the animals are mentioned in the definitions of meaning, and if they are in fact mentioned at all. The entries for the verb and noun uses of the words may not contain the same information. The examples, in cases where the animal readings are exemplified at all, may come in a different entry from where the relevant definition of meaning is provided. One of the dictionaries also relies heavily on definitions where the word’s meaning is explained in terms of itself. The use of synonyms in the meaning explanations of onomatopoeic words is also found to be problematic. As these words do not merely identify a referent, but describe or imitate what the referent sounds like, exchanging one word for another does not carry over the same imagery of sound.

Iconicity in the language of comics: A Swedish case study

Comics are multimodal forms of storytelling, where images and linguistic items combine to create lively narratives. They also offer rich material for investigating lexical iconicity. Expressive items in both dialogue bubbles and panels commonly add dimensions of sound (bang), motion (swish), sensory experiences (yuk), and inner feelings or cognitive states (argh, gak). Even though comics are silent and visual, readers’ understanding of the sound dimension of written words affords iconic mappings that bring sound and emotion to the stories (Oyola 2011). Petersen (2007, 2009) describes how readers experience the sounds through a form of sub-vocalisation, triggering iconic mappings and creating a form of narrative erotics. Iconicity in comics also extends beyond properties of words and includes iconic aspects of font sizes and styles (Forster et al 2012) or shapes of dialogue bubbles (Forceville et al 2010).

Expressive Items in comics are often discussed as onomatopoeic expressions or interjections (Forster et al 2012; Guynes 2014). However, the full scope of relevant expressive items in comics cannot be covered by these categories. As the examples in the first paragraph illustrate, iconic mappings do not relate only to sound. Some recent studies have acknowledged this limitation and are instead treating the items as ideophones (e.g. Pischedda 2024). Ideophones display iconic mappings between form and meaning, including, but extending beyond, the sound dimension (Akita & Dingemanse 2019). Like ideophones, expressive items in comics depict sensory imagery not only of sound but also of movement, other sensory experiences, inner feelings and cognitive states (Dingemanse 2012).

This study aligns with recent work (Pischedda 2024) in treating expressive items in comics as ideophones but extends the research into new territory. To date, no detailed linguistic studies of expressive items in comics originally written in Swedish exist. This study addresses the gap by analyzing ideophones in the Swedish comic Rocky by Martin Kellerman: known for its realistic representation of spoken Swedish interaction (Fägersten 2019). Through manual analysis of the first Rocky album (Kellerman 1999), ideophones are identified and categorized by lexical status. English influence on both spoken Swedish and the language of comics (Valero Garces 2014; Pischedda 2017), necessitates checking items against both Swedish and English dictionary sources. Items not found in the sources are categorized as non-lexical. These are further sub-categorized as ‘comics items’ (if found in comics items’ compilations like Gasca & Gubern 2008 and Taylor 2018) or ‘creative constructions’ if not.

Findings show that Rocky contains a high number of items depicting sensory imagery. While most items do have iconic sound mappings, they often represent feelings, reactions, or cognitive states through depicting human vocalizations. Many are fully lexicalized interjections in Swedish, often written in larger fonts or elongated (åååååååååååh). Swedish lexical words dominate, but the material also includes English lexical words (crunch, yikes), comics items (fwoom, blam), and creative constructions (frodobolf, uööözzz). Creative constructions with related meanings can show form similarity, guäck (‘disgust’), guläck (‘negative taste experience’), and uuääck (‘vomiting’), with possible influence from related lexicalized words äckel (‘disgust’) and äcklig (‘disgusting’).

References

Akita, Kimi and Mark Dingemanse (2019), Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives), in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dingemanse, Mark (2012), Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones, Language and Linguistics Compass6/10, 654–672.

Forceville, Charles, Tony Veale and Kurt Feyaerts (2010), Balloonics: The visuals of balloons in comics, in J. Goggin, and D. Hassler-Forest (eds), (2010), The rise and reason of comics and graphic literature: Critical essays on the form, Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co, 56–73.

Forster, Iris, Susanne R. Borgwaldt, and Martin Neef, (2012), Form follows function: Interjections and onomatopoetica in comics, Writing systems research 4.2, 122–139.

Fägersten, Kristy B. (2019), Linguistics: Comics conversations as data in Swedish comic strips, in M. J. Smith, M. Brown and R. Duncan (eds), (2019), More critical approaches to comics: Theories and methods, New York: Routledge, 145–159.

Gasca, Luis and Román Gubern (2008), Diccionario de onomatopeyas del comic, Cátedra.

Guynes, Sean A. (2014), Four-color sound: A Peircean semiotics of comic book onomatopoeia, Public Journal of Semiotics 6.1, 58–72.

Kellerman, Martin (1999), Rocky, vol. 1, Stockholm: Ordfront Galago.

Oyola, Osvaldo (2011), This is not a sound: The treachery of sound in comic books, in Sounding Out: The Sound Studies Blog, Retrieved from http://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/06/

Petersen, Robert S. (2007), The acoustics of manga: Narrative erotics and the visual presence of sounds, International Journal of Comic Art 9(1), 578–90.

Petersen, Robert S. (2009), The acoustics of manga, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds), (2009), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 163–171.

Pischedda, Pier Simone (2017), Anglophonic influence in the use of sound symbolism in Italian Disney comics: A corpus-based analysis, Open Linguistics 3.1, 591–612.

Pischedda, Pier Simone (2024), The sound of the Italian comic book: Representing noises, senses, and emotions across 80 years, Open Linguistics, 10(1).

Taylor, Kevin (2018), Ka-Boom!: A Dictionary of Comic Book Words, Symbols & Onomatopoeia, Kevin J Taylor.

Valero Garces, Carmen (2014), Onomatopoeia and Unarticulated Language in the translation and production of comic books, in F. Zanettin (ed), (2014), Comics in Translation, 237–255.

Ideophones are words that depict sensory imagery, including sound, movement, vision, smell, taste, tactility, bodily sensationsand mental states. They are argued to be both iconic and conventionalized in nature: although their forms are assumed to resemble their meanings, different languages conventionalize different forms for the same meanings. An object hitting water says splash in English, plask in Swedish and loisk in Finnish. Ideophonic items are frequent in comics, where they are used to add dimensions of sound, movement etc. (SWISH!!! RING!! RING!!) to staticimages. An examination of comic strips reveals how ideophonic items fall on a continuum, ranging fromclearly onomatopoeic and imitative itemsto items created from originally arbitrary words. It is not clear, however,what processes are used, when such items are created. The Finnish examples imur imur, ravis ravis and nipist appear to be formed from the nouns i.mu.ri ‘vacuum cleaner’, ra.vis.tus ‘a shaking’ or ni.pis.tys ‘a pinch’ or the verbsi.mu.roi.da ‘to vacuum’, ra.vis.taa ‘to shake’ or ni.pis.tää ‘to pinch’. The resulting items are not ‘proper’ words on any account, and none of the‘proper’ word-formation processes in Finnish can produce them. In the Swedish versions, the translated items are similar in form to the nouns sug, skak and nyp which are related to the verbs suga, skaka and nypa. The imperative forms of verbs may or may not look identical to the nouns. Given the correspondence in form and meaning between the Swedish noun and verb forms, it is difficult to ascertain what forms underlie the translation. The matter is not limited to translations, as the same observations holdfor comic strips that are originally written in Swedish. In this paper, we examine comic strips written in Finnish and Swedish, to identify what types of words give rise to formations such as above; what such formations do in the comic strips; and what processes appear to be employed.We focus on comics originally written in Finnish and Swedish but will also make observations on how these items are translated between the two languages. 

Ideophones are words that depict sensory imagery, including sound, movement, vision, inner feelings andmental states (Dingemanse 2012). They are both iconic and conventionalized in nature: their formsresemble their meanings, yet different languages use different forms for the same meanings. Somethinghitting water makes a splash in English but a plask in Swedish.Ideophones are frequent in comics, where they add dimensions of sound, movement etc. and depictcharacters’ emotions. Following a tradition established in the 1920s, they are often placed in the images,as part of the graphic representation, and in the speech bubbles; McCloud (2004), Zanettin (2008),Guynes (2014). The first set is known as sound effects, the second as vocalizations. This implies that soundeffects are not part of language proper to the extent that vocalizations are.Studies on the translation of comics have shown that the above distinction affects what is translated andhow. Vocalizations tend to be translated more often than sound effects, which may be left in the originalform or adjusted in terms of spelling. This is common especially in translations from English into otherlanguages, including Spanish, French, German (Garces 2015), Italian (Pischedda 2017), Finnish, Estonian,Latvian and Lithuanian (Takaki 2021). Apart from translations of Japanese manga, there are few studieson translation into English.This paper examines the English translations of comics written in Swedish (Rocky, by Martin Kellerman)and Finnish (Viivi ja Wagner, by Juba). Although linguistic items in images and speech bubbles can beshown to have similar properties, the latter are translated more consistently. For the former, severalstrategies can be identified: material can be left unchanged, omitted (images 1-2) or adjusted in terms ofspelling (3-4). When they are translated properly, there is no clear distinction between them and materialin speech bubbles (5-6).

Dingemanse, Mark. “Advances in the Cross-linguistic Study of Ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass 6/10(2012): 654–672.

Garcés, Carmen Valero. “Onomatopoeia and Unarticulated Language in the Translation and Production of Comic Books.”In Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, 237-255. Manchester: St Jerome, 2008.

Guynes, Sean A. “Four-color Sound: A Peircean Semiotics of Comic Book Onomatopoeia.” Public Journal of Semiotics 6.1(2014): 58-72.

Juba. Viivi ja Wagner. Apua, sängyssäni on sika! Helsinki: Arktinen banaani, 1999.

Juba. Viivi & Wagner. Wow, a Pig in my Bed! Translated by Elina Koskelin and Juba. Middletown: CreateSpace, 2017.

Kellerman, Martin. Rocky. Stockholm: Ordfront Galago, 1999.

Kellerman, Martin. Rocky, Vol. 1: The Big Payback. Translated by Kim Thompson. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

Pischedda, Pier Simone. “Anglophonic Influence in the Use of Sound Symbolism in Italian Disney Comics: A Corpus-basedAnalysis.” Open Linguistics 3/1 (2017): 591-612.

Takaki, Akira. “Lits! Lörts! Šlurkt! Šliupšt! Onomatopoeettiset interjektiot suomen, viron, latvian ja liettuansarjakuvakäännöksissä.” MA diss., University of Helsinki, 2021.

Zanettin, Federico. 2008. “Comics in Translation: An Overview.” In Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, 1-32. Manchester: St Jerome, 2008.

This study examines the relation between interjections and ideophones in Swedish. Ideophones are expressive words that are colourful depictions, even dramatizations, of events and sensory perceptions. Ideophones demonstrate a lower degree of syntactic integration in language than ordinary words. In linguistic literature, the terms interjection and ideophone are often seen as overlapping and even conflated. The current study examines the treatment of interjections in Swedish language description, focusing on their relation to ideophones. The starting point is a specific group of interjections, »descriptions of events», that contains words sharing many traits with ideophones. Two specific interjections, vips and svisch, are investigated using data from the Swedish Language Bank. The analysis of the corpus data shows that the items pattern very differently. However, both items are found as loosely integrated items, on the one hand, and as fully integrated adverbs and nouns, on the other. The loosely integrated items display forms of sentence integration that are well-described for ideophones cross-linguistically and are therefore interpreted to be ideophones. The integrated uses are discussed from the perspectives of deideophonization and lexicalization of ideophones into non-expressive words. As Swedish has items that qualify as ideophones, the paper argues that Swedish language description needs to accommodate their existence to a greater degree.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the uses of schm-reduplications, also known as deprecative reduplications, in current corona virus related discourse. The investigation shows that schm-reduplications, such as covid schmovid, corona schmorona and pandemic schmandemic, are often used in a spirit-lifting function, to show that, despite all the threats and complications posed by the virus and national lockdowns, we are still able to do things and that we also continue to have a sense of humour in our lives. Another common function of schm-reduplications is criticism of other people’s irresponsible behaviour. The functions identified in previous work on schm-reduplications—associations with aspects of irony, scorn, scepticism, disparagement and dismissal—are seldom present in the corona virus related formations.

Ideophones – also known as expressives and mimetics – are defined as “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2012, p 674). Typical examples include the following:

Siwu (Ghana)  mukumuku     ‘mouth movements of a toothless person eating’ Dingemanse (2011)

Korean           ulakpulak       ‘unbalanced, scary appearance’ Lee (1992)

Upper Necaxa Totonac (Mexico)                 liplip               ‘sparkling like a diamond or piece of glass’ Beck (2008)

The study of ideophones has its roots in the descriptive study of African languages, where they exist in the thousands and are commonly assumed to form a category on their own, alongside nouns and verbs (Dingemanse 2018; Akita & Dingemanse, 2019). Japanese and Korean linguistics also has a long tradition of the study of ideophonic (mimetic) vocabulary items (e.g. Akita, 2009). In European language study, the main focus has been on onomatopoeia and ideophones, if they have been discussed at all, have often been brushed under the carpet as “curiosities”, “playthings” and “marginal exceptions” that no serious linguist should get entangled with. Although in recent years new research has shown that ideophones exist and are by no means rare in European languages either, many “official” accounts – such as those provided in the grammars of these languages – are still very rudimentary and vague. If ideophones are mentioned at all, this is done in the section/s dealing with word formation, and very little is said about their syntax, semantics or pragmatics.

Swedish is one case in point. Traditional descriptions of Swedish often do not mention ideophones at all. Recent studies acknowledge their existence (see also Dahl 2018, Hagström-Krüger 2019) but even in these accounts there is often no clarity as to how to categorize them syntactically, and especially how to separate them from interjections (see also Dingemanse 2009). In SAG, for example, clearly ideophonic items, such as vips, pladask and svisch, are categorised by default as onomatopoeic interjections and their possible other uses are not addressed. In Swedish dictionaries, on the other hand, we sometimes see the exact opposite; for instance, pladask has been viewed as a member of almost every lexical category that exists.

In this talk we are going to show that while ideophones and interjections have certain similarities in Swedish, these similarities are not enough to motivate a view where ideophones are simply a subcategory of interjections. We will also show, with the help of corpus data, that for many ideophones, the type of multicategoriality described in the dictionaries is quite rare.

Akita, Kimi. 2009: A grammar of sound-symbolic words in Japanese: theoretical approaches to iconic and lexical properties of Japanese mimetics. Doctoral dissertation, Kobe University.

Beck, David. 2008: Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac. In: International Journal of American Linguistics 74(1). pp. 1–46.

Dahl, Östen. 2018: Vips tar ideofonerna revansch. In: Språktidningen, 3, 34–38. Retrieved 2019-03-29 from http://spraktidningen.se/print/artiklar/2018/03/vips-tar-ideofonerna-revansch

Dingemanse, Mark. 2009, November 18: Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries! [web log]. Retrieved from http://ideophone.org/ideophones-are-not-response-cries/

Dingemanse, Mark. 2011: Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. In: Senses & Society 6:1. pp. 77–85.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2012: Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. In: Language and Linguistics Compass 6/10. pp. 654–672.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2018: Redrawing the margins of language: lessons from research on ideophones. In: Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 3(1):4. pp. 1–30.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2019: Ideophone as a comparative concept. In: (eds.) Akita, K. & Pardeshi. P. Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hagström-Krüger, Joakim. 2019: Ideofoners användning i svenska: En korpusundersökning. Ba thesis. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.

Lee, Jin-Seong. 1992: Phonology and sound symbolism of Korean ideophones. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.

SAG = Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan & Andersson, Erik, 1999: Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts Ordbok.

The new forms of written online communication offer a great resource for researchers interested in language variation and use, but more large-scale systematic research into the nature of the data is needed. For instance, Swedish blog data is often described as more informal and spoken in nature than traditional edited written material but overall systematic comparisons are lacking. This short communication contributes systematic comparisons between blog data and spoken and written registers by comparing measures such as type/token ratios and word frequencies. Type/token ratios of blog texts are found to lie between those for interactive speech and formal edited writing, whereas the distribution of words from different frequency bands is closer to the written material. Comparison of the ten most frequent word forms indicates that blog data resembles formal edited writing from a structural perspective, but also suggests that further studies into features of personal involvement may provide additional insights.

This paper describes a corpus of writing as a process (MUCH), comprising English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student texts. The corpus will contain a large number of richly annotated papers in several versions from students of different performance levels. It will also include peer and instructor feedback, as well as tools for visualising the revision process, and for analysing the writing process and the peer and instructor feedback. MUCH will make it possible to study how texts develop and change in the course of the writing process and how feedback impacts the process.

MUCH: THE MALMÖ UNIVERSITY-CHALMERS CORPUS OF ACADEMIC WRITING AS A PROCESS Andreas Eriksson, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg; Damian Finnegan, Asko Kauppinen, Maria Wiktorsson, Anna Wärnsby, Malmö University, Malmö; Peter Withers, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen This poster introduces a recently-launched corpus project which aims to compile and monitor various text drafts involved in the writing process of EFL students in higher education. The corpus material will consist of three drafts of undergraduate, master or PhD student texts. Additionally, the corpus will contain a collection of self-reflective papers. Papers will be collected from approximately 400 students per year over a three-year period. In addition to parts-of-speech tagging, the corpus will include peer comments between the first and second drafts and teacher comments between the second and third drafts, as well as annotations of information structure and rhetorical structures. Upon its completion, the corpus will consist of about 500,000 words, excluding the metadata and peer and teacher comments. The corpus is primarily an academic writing research corpus, but also a pedagogic and linguistic corpus, and it is the combination of these perspectives that we would like to emphasise. One important aim of the project is to narrow the gap between writing pedagogy and the use of corpora for teaching and learning purposes. In writing pedagogy, the focus has been on issues such as writing as social action (Miller 1984), feedback processes (Hyland & Hyland 2006) and the development of academic literacy (Lea & Street 1998, Lillis & Scott 2007, Street 2004), whereas there has been a tendency in corpus-driven and corpus-based pedagogy to focus on linguistic aspects of language learning, such as vocabulary, grammar and phraseology. This tendency is, for instance, evidenced in Flowerdew’s (2010) comprehensive overview of how corpora have been used in writing instruction. There are obviously notable exceptions to this somewhat sweeping description (see e.g. Charles 2007 and Flowerdew 2008). However, a lot more can be done to merge these two perspectives. We believe that a corpus containing drafts tagged for information structure, rhetorical structures, and linguistic structures as well as peer and teacher feedback is an important step in such a process. In this poster, we will establish the rationale for the project by exemplifying how the corpus can be used for research purposes as well as teaching and learning purposes. We will show how the corpus can be employed in the study of: 1) peer and teacher comments; 2) thesis statements and how these are formed, located and realised in students’ writing processes; and 3) linguistic structures, such as elements recurring in thesis statements. References: Charles, M. 2007. Reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to graduate writing: Using a corpus to teach rhetorical functions. Journal of English for Specific Purposes 6: 289-302. Flowerdew, L. 2008. Corpus linguistics for academic literacies mediated through discussion activities. In D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), The Oral-Literate Connection: Perspectives on L2, speaking, writing and other media interactions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 268-287 Flowerdew, L. 2010. Using a corpus for writing instruction. In O’Keeffe, Anne & McCarthy, Michael (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 444-457. Hyland, K. & Hyland, F. (eds.). 2006. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Contexts and Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, C. R. 1984. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70:151-167. Lea, M. R. and Street, B. (1998) Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2): 157–172. Lillis, T. & Scott, M. 2007. Defining Academic Literacies Research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1): 5-32. Street, B. (2004) Academic Literacies and the ‘new orders’: implications for research and practice in student writing in higher education. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, 1(1): 9–20.