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Abstract: My thesis deals with onomatopoeia in English nursery rhymes. The aim of this thesis is to give a thorough analysis of onomatopoeic words in nursery rhymes. The analysis will show the function, the meaning, the etymology and the pronunciation of onomatopoeic words. Apart from the language analysis, the thesis deals with word-formation processes and classification of nursery rhymes and their connection to culture and history. Nursery rhymes are culturally bound and therefore proper understanding means also knowing about the cultural background and habits of English speaking countries. The majority of traditional nursery rhymes were not originally composed for children. They described historical events, religious persecution, murders, diseases, wars or were the parodies of the political situation of those times. For centuries they were passed on orally, before they were first collected and written down in the middle of the 18th century. One of the most important collections of English nursery rhymes is The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, published by Iona and Peter Opie in 1951. It contains 554 rhymes, of which 108 contain at least one onomatopoeic word. These are mostly words that imitate human and animal voices and sounds from nature.
Keywords: nursery rhymes, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, onomatopoeia, imitation, word-formation
Published in DKUM: 07.09.2016; Views: 1802; Downloads: 164
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