The sound of the Italian comic book: Representing noises, senses, and emotions across 80 years

Abstract

This article will describe the long-time use of sound symbolic forms (including ideophones and interjections) in Italian Disney comic book publications, from the 1930s until recent times. This is achieved through the diachronic analysis of ∼4,700 entries coming from a corpus of sound symbolic forms as compiled by the author, taken from 210 Disney stories. Each of the entries was classified according to five different sound symbolic types based on the event, scenario, or situation they referred to. This analysis will provide an ideal chance to comment on several features exploited in the creation and use of sound symbolic forms and will be offered together with elucidations on a few under-researched areas within the linguistic study of sound symbolism. Quantitative data will be provided on (1) the lexical status of these forms, (2) their language of origin, and (3) the frequency of the five sound symbolic types. Additional commentary will also be offered on the various lexical and phonaesthetic experimentations featured in the comic strips. The results will be based on the comparison of the data coming from the corpus with existing research on these topics.