The olfactory portrait of the city in modern english language consciousness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17308/lic/1680-5755/2023/3/104-109Keywords:
complex concept, the image of the city, semantics, odoronym, synesthesia, olfactory worldviewAbstract
The article is concerned with the way the city is depicted in English language fiction of the XX–XXI centuries from the perspective of smell. The study was conducted on the material of examples taken from the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English. Smells and odours adherent to cities were analyzed with the focus on the social element of the odoratives’ semantics used to form the image of the city, including its positive and negative evaluation, as well as the symbolism of smells in the linguoculture concerned. In the process of studying odoronyms, the most productive lexemes for the olfactory description of the locus were identifi ed, and the odorants were classified from the point of view of word formation (simple, compound, analytical), the source of smell (natural and man-related), as well as characteristics of the perception of smells (pleasant and unpleasant, disgusting). The results of the study showed that the olfactory portrait of the city of this period is a complex multicomponent formation characterized by a high degree of subjectivity, in which negatively perceived odors of a physiological and technogenic nature prevail, while the spectrum of positively perceived odors is limited to food odors and natural ones. The ability of smells to serve as a trigger for human memories is reflected in the authors' repeated reference to the "Proust phenomenon". Also, recurring typical characteristics of smells alongside with some cases of synesthetic transfer from two areas of sensory perception, namely from the spheres of "hearing" and "touch" were identified, the existence of which confirms the importance of odoronyms for the description of the semantics of the concept in the linguistic consciousness.
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