ABSTRACT
Semiotics and linguistics both deal with understanding systems of human communication, and as sciences, they share a common foundation. The beginning of Comics Studies in Europe is closely linked to the emergence of semiotics as a separate scientific discipline. One characteristic of many comics that attracted the attention of linguists and semioticians early on was sound effects. Linguistics not only brings a different set of research topics to Comics Studies, but also a different research methodology. The author shows that quantitative methods from corpus linguistics can be used not only to analyze the evolution of language in long-running popular comics, but also to compare stylistics. Stylistic devices such as onomatopoeia can be used to differentiate between genres of comics or to show evolutions within a certain body of work. The visual aspects of onomatopoeias in comics are as important as the reference to sound itself, but scholars in general have written less about the graphics of sound effects.
