The Linguistic Rebel: Semantic and Syntactic Peculiarity in the Use of Sound Symbolic Forms in Italian Disney Comics

Sound symbolic words, also known as ideophones, represent that part of language that attempts to imitate real-life senses through the vocal tract. Sound symbolism as a discipline has often been overlooked and considered as relegated to child-like media and playful linguistic exchanges. In recent years, more and more research has been dedicated to these forms, which are often characterised by uncommon linguistic elements and tend to drift away from canonical grammatical and phonetic rules; for this reason, their analysis can reveal new perspectives on language creation and linguistic iconicity. The current study aims to align itself with those enquiries that have defined sound symbolic forms as ‘linguistic rebels’ and does this through the preliminary analysis of a bilingual corpus of ideophones taken from Italian Disney comics and created through extensive, doctoral archival work. The results will help clarify the role of ideophones in the comic book and will focus on identifying the morphophonological stratagems that make sound symbolic words expressive and iconic.