Besedotvorna produktivnost posnemovalnih medmetov za zvoke naprav v slovenščini
Word-formational Productivity of Onomatopoeic Interjections Imitating Machine Sounds in Slovene

Summary/Abstract: The article presents partial results of a wider study about the lexical potential of interjections in Slovene from the functional and lexicographical perspectives. The study focuses on interjections imitating machine sounds which are presented as entries from a to ž in the Slovenian Ortography (2001). On the basis of examples found, interjections were classified into more homogenous groups according to the type of machine. Each category was further analyzed by using corpus analysis, which was carried out on the trial version of the billion-word corpus of the Slovene language called Gigafida. The analysis focused on the existence of words created from interjections whose base comes from one of the subcategories of onomatopoeic interjections presented here. The results of the analysis have confirmed that this type of interjections and words formed from them are relatively frequent in expressive discourse. The most prominent are the interjections typically used for imitating the sound of musical instruments and their parts (brenk), tools (švrk, škrt), weapons (pok, švist) and transportation devices (puh). The results also showed that the interjections which are the base for forming verbs give rise to more extensive word families. Verbs formed from interjections can also form complex words of a higher order according to established word-formational patterns.

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