This book aims to provide an account of both what and how onomatopoeia communicate by applying ideas from the relevance theoretic framework of utterance interpretation. It focuses on two main aspects of the topic: the contribution that onomatopoeia make to communication and the nature of multimodal communication. This is applied in three domains (food discourse, visual culture in Asia and translation) in the final sections of the book. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, stylistics, philosophy of language, literature, translation, and Asian studies.