The Semantics of Verbs Denoting Animal Sounds

This paper is meant to show the behavior of English verbs denoting animals sounds. As these verbs rather form a marginal group in the English lexicon, it is not easy to find appropriate literature. In fact, quite a number of publications about animal sounds exist, however, most of them belong to the field of biology and treat the production and timbre of the sound itself - often documented by different types of tape recordings. When dealing with the semantics of animal sounds, one has to consider the fact that to this day, this group of verbs has received only very little linguistic attention. This means, there is only few information about the lexical fields or characteristics of these verbs. The few facts that exist can be found in general publications about the properties of English verbs. If there is no explicit section about animal sounds in these works, some of their characteristics are often discussed in chapters about verbs of sound emission or verbs of manner of speaking.This paper is intended to present as well as to comment on the informations available. First, I am going to discuss the lexical field of animal sounds by an attempt to give it a sensible structure. Furthermore, the specific properties of the verbs denoting animal sounds and the difference between literal and figurative meaning will be treated. The last two parts are intended to show the properties of verbs denoting animal sounds when used as verbs of sound emission or as verbs of manner of speaking.