PHONETICS OF UNITS

A) Onomatopoeia (sound imitation) – is demonstrating, by pho­netic means, the acoustic picture of reality. First of all, the cries of beasts and birds are not only reproduced by each language in its own way (compare the English bow-wow, mew, cock-a-doodle-doo with their Russian counterparts), but even names of certain birds are ono­matopoeic: cuckoo. Noise-imitating interjections bang, crack are ono­matopoeia. Moreover, certain verbs and nouns reflect the acoustic na­ture of the processes: hiss, rustle, whistle, whisper, each word contains the sibilant [s].

Onomatopoeia, or elements of it, can sometimes be found in po­etry.

e.g. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before...

This quotation can be found in virtually every book on stylistics of English. Their authors, however, seldom underline the circumstance that E.A. Poe was an American hence the words uncertain, purple, and curtain had, for the poet and his American readers, the sound [r], not the British [э:], in the stressed syllables (the so-called American retroflexion), which certainly contributes to the expression of the idea of rustling. It may seem at first glance that we are beginning to deal with syntagmatics, with phonetics of sequences. It is right, of course, that the repetition of the sounds [s] and [r] could be treated as a problem of sequences in phonetics; but here we are interested in the choice between non-imitative or imitative words. And, perhaps, we should not have stressed the fact of the repe­tition of the same two sounds, but rather the fact that the sound [s] is employed to express 'softness', whereas the sound [r] helps to express, by direct imitation, the rustling of curtains.

Sound imitation may also be used for comical representation of for­eign speech. An example, not from English, but from Russian litera­ture, will serve our purpose best. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky makes one of the characters of his comedy The Bathhouse, Pont Kitch (an American businessman in the USSR), enunciate senseless sequences of Russian words, which sound very much like English word combina­tions - rather incoherent, disconnected, but still English enough. One must bear in mind that Mayakovsky's knowledge of English was less than poor: he knew at most several words. All the more astonishing appears his ability to demonstrate what English speech is like. «Ай Иван шел в рай, а звери обедали» is what Kitch says on entering the stage, and this certainly resembles the ungrammatical and actually meaningless utterance " I once shall rise very badly (!).

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