Onomatopoeias in the Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg as a Linguistic-Interpretive Junction

רכיבים אונומטופאיים וחדשנות לשונית בשירי רחובות הנהר לאורי צבי גרינברג

Abstract

This study examines onomatopoeic elements in the book Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power (1951) by Uri Zvi Grinberg. The book contains many onomatopoeic components in which language mimics and recreates the sounds of the Jewish European world that was destroyed in the Second World War. This paper aims to analyze the multitude of ways in which these onomatopoeic elements were created and how they are deciphered in the poetic context. At the heart of the discussion are two types of onomatopoeias: acoustic onomatopoeias and onomatopoeic VPC’s (void pragmatic connectives), as defined by Itamar Even-Zohar. These elements allow the poet to represent human voices and various sounds through morphological means, thus overcoming the difficulty to present the quality, duration, and frequency of a sound in writing. The discussion is based on morphologic, semantic, and pragmatic terms, highlighting the onomatopoeic components as a type of linguistic style in Grinberg's poetry, while examining the way they are formed.