Lexical and Semantic Synesthesia as a Means of Impressionistic Imagery
Date
2023Author
Pradivlianna L, Kozachyshyna O.
Прадівлянна Л.М., Kozachyshyna O.Л.
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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.