Onomatopoeia-occasionalisms as a feature of Japanese colloquial speech

In this article, the author analyzes occasional forms of onomatopoeia in Japanese colloquial speech. Being a flexible system that stands out for its negligence, expressiveness and direct relation to the context, colloquial speech accepts breaking of language rules that are crucial for codified literary language. The form of onomatopoeia is short, however, such words can describe a huge variety of meanings. Therefore, onomatopoeia, including its occasional variants, is common in colloquial speech, making it more vivid. Japanese onomatopoeia often involves in word creation process, however, the topic of its occasional variants has not been studied thoroughly yet, which determines the scientific novelty of this research. The object of the study is Japanese onomatopoeia. The subject of the study is its occasional variants. The article examines daily dialogues of ordinary Japanese people and analyzes onomatopoeia they used (its occasional variants on different language layers and possible reasons behind the choice of such onomatopoeia usage). After the analysis, we found out that onomatopoetic occasional variants could be seen on phonetic, morphologic and syntactic levels. The Japanese can use in onomatopoeia unrepresentative for Japanese language sounds, significantly prolong vowels and consonants. Extraordinary combinations of onomatopoeic roots also take place, and some onomatopoetic roots, which end with prolonged vowel, can add geminate. Furthermore, some onomatopoeia serve as an attribute in a sentence and add unusual affix «–na» of nominal adjectives. As a result, we have observed that these methods increase emotionality and vividness of the speech, gain attention of the interlocutor and give the information in a shorter form.

the Japanese language, onomatopoeia, occasionalism, colloquial speech, word creation, neologism, loanword, semantic analysis, lexicology, uncodified vocabulary