Onomatopoeia and Relevance

"This book provides an innovative and insightful analysis of onomatopoeia, and it is an original and convincing application of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework. It combines a strong theoretical argument with discussion of real-world examples and applications. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in expressive or persuasive writing (advertising discourse, food writing etc.), and it will also be of interest to those working on translation." Kate Scott, Kingston University, UK


This book aims to provide an account of both what and how onomatopoeia communicate by applying ideas from the relevance theoretic framework of utterance interpretation.  It focuses on two main aspects of the topic:  the contribution that onomatopoeia make to communication and the nature of multimodal communication.  This is applied in three domains (food discourse, visual culture in Asia and translation) in the final sections of the book. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, stylistics, philosophy of language, literature, translation, and Asian studies.Ryoko Sasamoto is Associate Professor in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) at Dublin City University, Ireland.