A Study of Onomatopoeia in Avatar Comics

ABSTRACT

This study examines onomatopoeia constructed in Avatar comics. Onomatopoeia is one example of iconic sign as an object named after the sound it produced. Although considered as the primitive language, most onomatopoeic words have been conventionalized. When their meaning broadened finally they become part of ordinary language.

Onomatopoeia used for several reasons, not only in written language but in spoken language as well. People often use onomatopoeia to make an effect in writing. By using onomatopoeia, the sound words can be visually written and displayed. Today, the use of onomatopoeia is not only limited for writing device, but it is used for advertisement, news headline, comic strips and other children story. The numbers of onomatopoeia increase along the time because of people demand to create something amusing. This study uses comic as the object because studying linguistics by using comics is something interesting. The language style used in comic seems simpler and saves the space.

The objectives of this study are to find out onomatopoeic words constructed in Avatar comics and then describe all onomatopoeic words based on their characteristics, their type and their use. Furthermore, it is aimed to describe the lexical meaning and the contextual meaning of onomatopoeic words in Avatar comics which are sometime different from each other.

This study uses descriptive qualitative method to answer the statement of
the problems. The data are collected from Avatar comic series scanned from Nick
Magazine. There are some chapters that available to get, they are; ‘The Bridge’,
‘Going Home Again’, ‘Sokka the Avatar’, ‘It’s Only Natural’ and ‘Gym Time’.

The result of this study shows that there are several characteristics of onomatopoeic words which are constructed in Avatar comic. They are; phonological feature, variation of word, short spelling and fresh minted. Furthermore, the most dominant type of onomatopoeia in Avatar comic is non- reduplicated onomatopoeia. This study also concludes that there are four kinds of onomatopoeia, they are; sound of nature, sound made by human, calls of animal and miscellaneous sound. Finally this study examines that not all onomatopoeic words in Avatar comics have similar meaning as the context. Sometime they are different from each other.

Finally, this study suggests that the next researcher conduct further research in examining the similar topic to be able to expand this study by giving different point of view, as the word class or syntactical onomatopoeic words. There are still many aspects which have not been analyzed yet.