Features of representing emotions through color associations in a literary text (based on the novella “First Love” by Ivan Turgenev)

Abstract

One of the most relevant trends that interests modern language science is the study of the way the inner world of humans is encoded in literary texts through various linguistic means. At the same time, the issues of specificity of using color designations as a means of conveying emotional information in Ivan Turgenev’s works remain incompletely studied.This work comprehensively analyzes the features of verbalizing the emotive space through lexemes with the semantics of color in Ivan Turgenev’s novella “First Love”. The research methods include contextual, semantic, linguistic-statistical, descriptive and psycholinguistic analyses.In the course of our research, we examined the occurrences of color lexemes along with their quantitative and frequency characteristics in Ivan Turgenev’s novella “First Love”. The article provides a classification of all identified words based on categorical-lexical themes and analyzes their specificity of associative emotive reinterpretation in the context.Color is a key element of visually perceived objects and phenomena, playing a crucial role in humans’ understanding of the surrounding world. In the context of Ivan Turgenev’s literary works, color lexemes both reflect the color characteristics of the objects and enable the writer to better reflect his worldview and emotional-psychological state. They imbue the text with figurative meanings and lend it emotional and evaluative coloration.