Voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ in the Russian Language Consciousness

Abstract

The article is concerned with voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ as a language-specific word in order to show its specific conceptual configuration in the Russian language consciousness. In this regard, the National Corpus seems to be most appropriate since a conceptual configuration of the analyzed emotional concept is not given in a “finished” form in any single utterance, but may be reconstructed only on the sum total of all possible utterances. It can be manifested in many different ways: distribution, predisposition to be associated with some emotional attitudes, concepts, propositional and metaphoric models.

According to the available data, voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ is related, in its most manifestations, to many different concepts like gratitude, adoration, fascination, sympathy, mistrust, pity, fear, envy, that allow us to reconstruct some basic delight-situations as a delight-adoration, delight-approval, delight-surprise, delight-gratitude, delight-envy, etc. As such, the delight-emotion is caused not by an event itself, but what the subject thinks about it. In this perspective, voskhishcheniye is not only an emotional but also a mental state that causes a corresponding emotional reaction.

The propositional model, built on the National Corpus, includes information that predicates associated with voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ vary according to the position in a syntactic structure of a proposition. As a semantic object voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ is felt, expressed, shown, delivered, caused, excited, anticipated, divided, given out, performed; as a semantic subject it worries, delivers gladness, covers your eyes. In a metaphoric mapping voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ is redefined over the categorical boundaries in terms of propositional models more appropriately applied to power, aquatic substance, honey or fire. By analogy with power it embraces and seizes; by analogy with an aquatic substance, it overfills and overflows; by analogy with fire it flames up and goes out, etc. And there are no other auxiliary objects more appropriate to characterize voskhishcheniye ‘delight’ in Russian except just power, aquatic substance, honey and fire, since native speakers don’t consider expressions like sweetest-smelling delight, awash with delight or to be smothered by delight as metaphoric ones, but rather take them for the authentic characteristic of voskhishcheniye ‘delight’.

Keywords: feelings and emotions, language picture of the world, language-specific words, opinion, propositional attitude, conceptual metaphor, axiological norms.