The onomatopoeic creation as a metaphorical transition in the representation of dicendi verbs in the Romanian and Spanish language

Abstract

There are many spheres of language in which we can find metaphorical representations of speaking verbs. The first thread that will guide our discussion will focus on the contextually dicendi verbs that reproduce some sound features of the animal world. The way we perceive the sounds animals use to communicate resembles somewhat the way in which we perceive human attitude in speech. The comparisons we are tempted to make between the two have wonderfully creative consequences in the way the verbs naming animal communication become certain substitutes for the proper dicendi verbs, having, at the same time, the advantage of the expressiveness originated from the sonority and the semantic transference that takes place from the animal world towards the world of humans. Further on, we will submit to contrastive analysis (Romanian- Spanish) those onomatopoeic verbs derived from interjections that try to reproduce varied sounds from the extralinguistic world, focusing on the examples that present compatibility with the register of human speech in terms of frequency, tonality, cadence or duration of the acoustic emission. In speech, the expressive function of language is updated and the semantic content is enriched with information regarding the emotional or physical state of the speaker.