SEMANTIC POTENTIAL OF SOUND-IMITATION WORDS (PROBLEMS OF STUDY AND LEXICOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION)

The article deals mainly with nationally specifi c sound-imitations of animal voices (ко-ко, ку-ку, кукареку, му-му, etc.). Sound-imitations are generally reluctantly and inconsistently included in explanatory dictionaries. On the one hand, they are close to interjections, because they imitate by means of language the voices of animals, the sounds of natural objects or phenomena, the “sound” of objects or physiological conditioned sounds produced by humans (кар-кар, вжух, бах, бабах, чпок, кхм-кхм). On the other hand, units of this group of words regularly lose their iconicity and acquire semantics corresponding to other parts of speech (performing the role of a noun, predicate, verb in a sentence). Researchers (M. Flaxman) hypothesize about the universal character of phonetic, syntactic and semantic transformations of sound-imitations; these transformations are common in many languages of the world.
Among the words of this group, the process of semantic evolution, development of new meanings in the sound-imitations of animal voices is least described. The article shows how this process takes place in the modern Russian language on the example of the words ку-ку and му-му. We propose variants of lexicographic description of the semantics of these words (based on the materials of the “Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Everyday Speech” and the draft dictionary article to it).