Towards the linguistic approach to ideasthesia (case study of the multilingual parallel corpus)

Abstract

The article considers the possibility of applying the term ideasthesia to linguistic material. This term refers to word combinations usually classified as synesthetic metaphors, despite the fact that they do not imply multimodality, because only one of the words contains a sensory semantic component (e. g. bitter love, sweet desire). The research is based on a parallel multilingual corpus including the original text of V. Nabokov’s Lolita in English (1955) and its Russian (1967) and French (1959, 2001) translations. The work’s objective is to determine the place of ideasthesia in the context of the study of linguistic synaesthesia and to examine the semantic structure of ideasthetic word combinations. Ideasthetic word combinations are being considered in comparison with synaesthetic (both words contain sensory semantic components related to different modalities) and monosthetic ones (both words contain sensory semantic components related to the same modality). In total, 637 word combinations have been identified, 73 % of which are ideastetic, 20 % are synaesthetic, and 7 % are monostetic. 465 phrases with ideasthesia have been analysed. The classification of lexical groups interacting with sensory vocabulary in ideasthetic word combinations have been proposed. 11 semantic classes have been identified: anthroponyms (19 % of the total number of ideasthetic contexts), emotions and feelings (17 %), time periods (12 %), qualities of a person (10 %), discourse (10 %), physical actions (9 %), mental actions and states (7 %), physical characteristics (7 %), physical sensations (5 %), body parts (2 %), and toponyms (2 %).