Sensory Semantic Component as the Basis for Synaesthesia Formation in Language: a Case Study of Arthur Rimbaud’s Poem "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat") and its Russian Translations

Abstract

The current article considers the phenomenon of synaesthesia in a literary text on the material of the Russian and  French languages. Our study proposes a new approach to a linguistic analysis of synaesthesia at the levels of words and word combinations. It introduces a systemic model describing groups of words related to sensory perception which serve as a basis for synaesthetic word combinations’ formation. The units of analysis were selected from a manually prepared author’s corpus of parallel texts including Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau ivre” and its 15 Russian translations. In order to classify the types of words related to sensory perception the notion of sensory semantic component (SSC) was introduced. The words were classified according to a number of criteria: the component criterion (number of SSCs within a word); the modal criterion (correlation with a sensory modality); the structural criterion (morphological structure of a word); and the criterion of semantic representation (the place of an SSC within a word’s semantics). At for the component criterion, all the words were classified by the number of SSCs as monocomponent (90 %) or multicomponent (10 %). If a word is classified as multicomponent, its SSCs can either belong to the same modality (and so, it is characterized as monosensory), or refer to different modalities (multisensory). The words from our corpus are generally monocomponent, i.e. they contain no more than one SSC. However, 10 % of the preselected words contain more than one SSC and are characterized by a complex morphological structure, representing, in fact, compounds. Multicomponent and complex words are typical only of the Russian part of the corpus. As far as the modal criterion is concerned, the French and Russian parts of the corpus provide similar results: sight appears to be the dominant modality for all the texts analyzed, whereas the sense of smell is the least common. As for the semantic representation of SSCs within a word’s meaning, this component is essential and determinant for 90 % of the units analyzed. The words containing SSCs belong to different parts of speech. In the French part of the corpus, the most common are adjectives (55 %), followed by nouns (27 %), verbs (9 %), participles I and II (9 %). As for the Russian texts, adjectives are also the most common (43 %), followed by nouns (35 %), verbs (14 %), participles I and II (5 %), gerunds (2 %), and adverbs (1 %).

Keywords: synaesthesia, parallel texts, literary translation, retranslation, translation studies, semantics, component analysis, French, Russian