Lexical and Semantic Synesthesia as a Means of Impressionistic Imagery

Abstract

Impressionism nowadays is regarded as a type of artistic thinking that emerges in the periods of crisis in culture and society. Best known in art, it did not develop into a specific literary style, but was used as a method, a technique in the works of many early XX century writers, including V. Woolf, J. Conrad, K. Mansfield, and is manifested in the strengthening of the pictorial principle, metaphorical style, in an almost poetic rhythm, and in a special type of synesthetic imagery. This paper aims to examine peculiarities of the linguistic presentation of the impressionist outlook in synesthetic constructions, define and analyze their types, and clarify how synesthesia contributes in creating specific impressionistic imagery. The research is based on the methodology of intermediality with the application of traditional descriptive linguistic research methods of distributional, componential, contextual and interpretive analysis. By its psychological nature, synesthesia is defined as a phenomenon in which sensations of one modality are assessed and described in terms of another sensory system. Our appeal to the phenomenon of synesthesia reflects the tendency of modern linguistics towards intermedial studies and new poly-paradigmatic approach to the linguistic research. Taking into account the specifics of the impressionistic texts, we identify simple and complex synesthetic nominations, and also consider a semantic typology, which is based on the semantics of a word and the direction of metaphorical transfer. The collected linguistic material was used to build lexico-semantic classification of synesthesia and helped to make conclusions about specific features of impressionist language which is motivated by the impressionist worldview.