Onomatopoeia, impressions and text on screen

The aim of this study is to shed light on the relationship between visual and verbal inputs into communication. To this end, I analysed the use of onomatopoeia as telop on Japanese TV in terms of the relevance theoretic notions of the showing-saying continuum and the definite-indefinite continuum. This analysis shows that onomatopoeia telop functions as a bridge between the verbal and non-verbal evidence in multimodal communicative acts, allowing for the interaction between different modes in terms of the distribution of intended imports in the two-dimensional view of meaning. Furthermore, this analysis, albeit in a limited manner, shows how relevance theory’s dynamic view of meaning can be successfully applied to an examination of a highly multimodal communicative act.