The figure of speech that we use the most when we are children is the onomatopoeia. When we play with a toy car, with a ball, with a doll or doll. No need to pull the memory. Just look at children today. When they play, they usually imitate the sounds of the car engine running, the dolls fighting, etc.
But is onomatopoeia used only by children? Of course not! Any adult, perhaps less often, also imitates animal and object sounds. That's what this figure of speech consists of.
Classified as a sound figure, onomatopoeia reproduces noise, noise, sounds of any being, transforming it into a word.
Sound figures have the function of using sounds to make sense of expressions. In other words, what matters in this type of figure of speech is not the idea itself, but its sound.
Let's look at this classic example that people of any age can express:
There is no concrete or abstract object called TIC Tac. However, this example shows that it is used to express the noise made by the clock when the hands are working.
Let's go to the sounds that children make when playing and that can also be found in comic books, for example:
Did you get nostalgia for your childhood? Or yet play like this? The comic books you read or still read contained a lot of these words, didn't they?
Now let's see other examples of onomatopoeia contained in our daily lives and in artistic and cultural productions:
The first example is well known to viewers of Sunday television programs. The “plim plim” refers to a television station vignette used in commercial breaks in the past.
In the second example, an expression that many people used recently, because of the World Cup. It refers to the style of play of the Spanish football team that secured a world title in 2010. However, this same style of play, in which there is a lot of touching the ball, didn't work anymore. Because of the possession of the ball in which players would, preferably, just touch and pass it to their teammate, this style was nicknamed tic tac (tik taka in Spanish). The example refers to the exaggerated possession of the ball to the detriment of little effectiveness in submissions and goals, which led to the elimination in the round of 16 of the 2018 World Cup.
The third example mimics the ringing sound on the door. The fourth example puts the sound emitted by cats as a noun, as well as the fifth example about the sound emitted by the rooster.
In internet language, there is also the custom of imitating the sounds of feelings. When the person doesn't use emojis, they use words like:
Many of these words can also be classified as interjection.
Still having doubts about what a Onomatopoeia? Check out the following video:
To meet others speech figures, continue on our blog.
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