Lexical representations of sensory images in Osip Mandelstam’s lyrics

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the publication of Osip Mandelstam’ “Tristia”. The relevance of this research lies in the anthropological vector of contemporary linguistics, which focuses its attention on the studies of authorial linguistic personality within their world-image. The anthropocentricity of Mandelstam’s poetry can be seen in his active use of lexemes with the semantics of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile sensations. This article aims to study the structural and semantic content of sensory images in Mandelstam’s poetry. The objectives include estimating the influence of the text’s genre on author’s representation of sensations and experiences. The theoretical part discusses the methodological foundations of the study and highlights the factors influencing the interpretation of creative works. In the practical part, the author describes the methods of lexicalization of the complex of sensory images, connected by an ideological and semantic commonality with the category of emotivism. The sphere of artistic perception is illustrated by quotations from poems. The conclusion presents the results of a contextual analysis of different types of sensations embodied in verbal data. The study of the composition and structure of text units is based on such parameters as the way of perception (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste), the principle of describing the lyrical situation (direct — figurative), and the principle of relating to different spheres of life (physi­cal, mental, social). The conclusions are the following: 1) in the analyzed material, semantic relations in the field of perception are closely connected with the idea of gravity; 2) lexical means of expressing sensory impressions have a metaphorical and metonymic motivation; 3) sensory complexes are formed at the intersection of visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, gustatory images (the listing corresponds to the descending order of word usage); 4) synthetic combination of individual aspects of sensory perception is carried out in various forms (agglutination, amplification, word typing); 5) repeating the Ovid’s genre experiment, Mandelstam created an ori­ginal literary and historical metaphor, through which he told, with his characteristic creative courage, about his time and about himself, using the impressive possibilities of the language as a means of poetic thought.