In this article I investigate polysemy within the word class of onomatopoeic verbal interjections in Russian. The main aim of the study is to demonstrate on the basis of data from the Russian National Corpus that these linguistic units combine sound-symbolic, interjectional and predicative features. Secondly, this research analyses cases of homonymy between onomatopoeic verbal interjections and other grammatical classes. It considers cues on the basis of which the linguistic units in question can be identified and classified as belonging to a certain class of words. Finally, this article considers factors that have caused both homonymy and polysemy to be typical of one and the same group of words such as Russian onomatopoeic verbal interjections.

The article is written in English.