A comparative linguistic study on onomatopoeia in Portuguese/German comics

Abstract

This study investigates the peculiar use of onomatopoeia in the language of comics as well as how the process of creation of new expressions in this context respects the phonetic and phonotactic systems of each language. An empirical investigation was conducted, in which native speakers of both German and Portuguese were asked to suggest or create the onomatopoeia that they judged adequate for several edited comic panels, in which the original onomatopoeia had deliberately been omitted. The analysis of the data made it possible to identify some specific characteristics regarding the phonetic sequence and the syllabic organization of the onomatopoeia in these languages.