Onomatopoeia in Contemporary Written Ukrainian: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Despite growing interest in sound symbolism across languages, onomatopoeia in Standard Ukrainian has not been thoroughly investigated [Hatsenko 2003a, 123]. This paper employs a corpus-based approach to investigate lexical onomatopoeia in contemporary written Ukrainian. Within the Ukrainian linguistic tradition, onomatopoeic words are treated as a subclass of interjections [Hatsenko 2003b]. The analysis is based on the ukTenTen22 corpus accessed via Sketch Engine. A dataset of 45 lexical onomatopoeic expressions was compiled manually from items tagged as interjections. For each item, ten concordance lines were extracted, resulting in a sample of 450 tokens. The selected items were classified into four semantic categories according to the type of sound imitated: human-related sounds, sounds of inanimate nature and plants, animal and bird sounds, and sounds associated with objects set in motion by humans. The analysis identifies tendencies in frequency, genre distribution, and contextual functions. The findings show that lexical onomatopoeia is concentrated mainly in literary texts, especially fiction and children’s literature. However, its presence in blogs, online comments, and news articles indicates that its use extends to a broader range of contemporary written discourse. The paper contributes new empirical evidence to the study of Ukrainian onomatopoeia and sound symbolism in Slavic languages.