Korean auditory adjective and onomatopoeia

In Korean most words representing human senses are adjectives. Korean sensory adjectives in many cases have a lot of morphologically related words and share the property that there are quite a number of them representing each of these senses and they are composed of a lot of semantically related poly-morphemic adjectives which have only minimal semantic distinction. Unlike other sense related adjectives, the number of auditory adjectives in Korean is quite small and there are few morphological related words in them. This study tried to explain why auditory adjectives in Korean are not as much developed as other sensory adjectives. This study examined expressing auditory sense by synesthesia and by onomatopoeia as ways of expressing auditory perception and thus reveal the peculiarity of auditory adjectives in Korean. Synesthesia in Korean is found in such a way that visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory adjectives transfer to auditory adjective. This kind of synesthesia is also found in English. In Korean an action and its associated sound are represented by a verb and an onomatopoeic adverbial, respectively, but this is not true in German and English because a single word class, either a verb or noun, can express both the action and its accompanying sound at the same time. There seems to be a close correlation between the number of the onomatopoeic words and the existence of a VP consisting of [a V + an onomatopoeic adverb] in a certain language.