Verbs of Sound Emission in the Croatian Language

The paper analyses verbs of sound emission at the syntactic, semantic, and lexicographic levels. These verbs are defined as verbs that describe an event in which someone or something emits a sound (Levin, Atkins and Song 1997), and they differ according to the emitter, sound qualities, manner and location of emitting the sound, etc. The list of 219 verbs, adapted from Mikelic Preradovic (2014) and Levin (1993), was analysed in four Croatian general monolingual dictionaries (Rjecnik hrvatskoga jezika, Sonje (2000), Hrvatski jezicni portal (HJP), Skolski rjecnik (Birtic et al. 2013), and Veliki rjecnik hrvatskoga standardnog jezika (Jojic et al. 2015)). Some differences in defining the verbs of sound emission have been noticed, but also the lack of consistency within one dictionary. The web corpora (hrWaC, Hrvatska jezicna riznica) are used to analyse verb meanings, collocations, and examples and it has been noticed that some verbs that primarily belong to the group of verbs of sound emission can have other meanings, which often changes their valency pattern. The verbs are divided according to whether the sound emits an inanimate or animate entity. With the inanimate emitter, the verbs can be connected to the verbs of movement, when the subject is the entity, which otherwise does not emit the sound itself, but it creates sound with its movement through the air (e.g. prozvizdati 'whistle') or does it in contact with water (pljusnuti.splash ') or with some other object (e.g. tresnuti 'slap'). Some of the verbs can also be associated with the verbs of physiological processes (e.g. hripati 'wheeze'). When the verbs of sounds made by animals have a human at the subject position, they also belong to the group of the verbs of the manner of speaking (kokodakati 'cluck') or they are verbs of expressing emotions that can be positive (e.g. presti 'purr') or negative (e.g. rezati 'growl'). The proposal for the lexicographic description of these verbs in the dictionary is to specify all meaning and to separate the meaning when the entity emits sound without and with the external causer, i.e. agent, which also affects the valency pattern. By citing examples from the corpus, it can also be noticed what or who can emit the sound and valence possibilities of the verb.