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--- abstract: 'This paper is a brief phonetic investigation of the nature of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is the imitation of natural noises by speech sounds. To understand this phenomenon, we must realize that there is a problem here which is by no means trivial. There i s an infinite number of noises in nature, but only twenty-something letters in an alphabet that convey in any language a closed system of about fifty (up to a maximum of 100) speech sounds. I have devoted a book length study to the expressiveness of lang u age (What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? -- The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception), but have only fleetingly touched upon onomatopoeia. In this paper I will recapitulate from that book the issue of acoustic coding, and then will toy around with two spe ci fic cases: why does the cuckoo say "kuku" in some languages, and why the clock prefers to say "tick-tock" rather than, say, tip-top. Only fleetingly I will touch upon the question why the speech sounds [s] and [S] (S represents the initial consonant of sh oe; s the initial consonant of sue) serve generally as onomatopoeia for noise. By way of doing all this, I will discuss a higher-order issue as well: How are effects translated from reality to some semiotic system, or from one semiotic system to ano ther.U.cns' altloc: - http://www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Tsur/default.html - http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/Cuckoo_onomatopoeia.html chapter: ~ commentary: ~ commref: ~ confdates: ~ conference: ~ confloc: ~ contact_email: ~ creators_id: [] creators_name: - family: Tsur given: Reuven honourific: '' lineage: '' date: 2001 date_type: published datestamp: 2003-10-18 department: ~ dir: disk0/00/00/32/32 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: - family: Magnus given: Margaret honourific: '' lineage: '' eprint_status: archive eprintid: 3232 fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/3232/1/Cuckoo_onomatopoeia_2.html full_text_status: public importid: ~ institution: ~ isbn: ~ ispublished: pub issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] keywords: 'Cognitive Poetics, Onomatopoeia, expressive sound, semitoic systems, translating from one code to another.' lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:22 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: This is a paper in Cognitive Poetics number: ~ pagerange: ~ pubdom: FALSE publication: Iconicity in language publisher: ~ refereed: TRUE referencetext: | Gaver, William W. 1993. “How Do We Hear in the World?: Explorations in Ecological Acoustics”. Ecological Psychology 5: 285-313. Jakobson, Roman l968. Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (The Hague: Mouton). Liberman, A. M. 1970. “The Grammars of Speech and Language.” Cognitive Psychology 1: 301–23. Liberman, A. M., F. S. Cooper, D. P. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-Kennedy. 1967. “Perception of the Speech Code,” Psychological Review 74: 431–61. May, Janet, and Bruno H. Repp. 1982. “Periodicity and Auditory Memory.” Status Report on Speech Research SR-69: 145–49. Haskins Laboratories. Repp, Bruno H. l984. “Categorical Perception: Issues, Methods, Findings,” in N. J. Lass (ed.), Speech and Language: Advances in Basic Research and Practice, 10:243–335. New York: Academic Press. Tsur, Reuven. 1992a. What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech-Perception Durham N, C.: Duke UP. relation_type: [] relation_uri: [] reportno: ~ rev_number: 8 series: ~ source: ~ status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:49:18 subjects: - comp-sci-lang - ling-sem - psy-ling - percep-cog-psy - comp-sci-speech - ling-phono succeeds: ~ suggestions: ~ sword_depositor: ~ sword_slug: ~ thesistype: ~ title: 'Onomatopoeia: Cuckoo-Language and Tick-Tocking+◊' type: journale userid: 488 volume: ~