Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2024.098.03
Lexical synesthesia in Croatian
Tatjana Pišković
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
*
Antea Hrenović
; Osnovna škola Rapska, Zagreb
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
In the first part of the paper, we highlight fundamental insights into synesthesia as a neurological
phenomenon and then focus on the linguistic interpretation of synesthesia as a lexical mechanism.
In neurology synesthesia denotes a specific and rare human ability of joint perception which emerges from a congenital ability to integrate sensations. Neurologists single out five basic manifestations
of neurological synesthesia: colored sequences, colored music, affective perceptions, nonvisual couplings and spatial sequences. The main impetus for neurological synesthesia is language, but neurological synesthesia is not the cognitive source for lexical synesthesia. Neurological synesthesia is
the ability among the rare individuals to join together the sensations from various sensory domains
into one unique sensation. Lexical synesthesia is the general language mechanism which enables
the creation of secondary meanings of polysemous lexemes. We understand lexical synesthesia as
the syntagmatic connection of the words whose primary lexical meanings relate to different sensory domains, whereby one of the elements of the syntagm retains its primary meaning while the
other activates its secondary meaning and leaves its primary sensory domain. Research into lexical
synesthesia is most often based on extracting congruent syntagms of adjectives and nouns from
dictionaries and corpora of general language. On the basis of the Croatian syntagms extracted that
comprise an adjective and a noun (e.g. topao glas ‘warm voice’, hladne boje ‘cold colors’, kiseo osmijeh
‘sour smile’, sladak miris ‘sweet smell’) we isolated the types of synesthetic transfer in Croatian and
determined their frequency. Inspired by Stephen Ullmann’s insights into the dominant tendencies in the synesthetic transfers, we created hierarchy of sensory modalities for Croatian language:
TOUCH→ TASTE → SMELL→ SIGHT→ HEARING.
Keywords
lexical synesthesia; Croatian language; neurological synesthesia; hierarchy of sensory modalities; polysemy; conceptual metaphor
Hrčak ID:
324633
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2024.
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