Raissa Ivanova, Russian Federation

REPRESENTATION OF THE EGOCENTRIC CATEGORY

OF HUMAN SENSATIONS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

During recent years the interest of linguists is concentrated on the study of the human cognitive mechanisms and their reflection in the system of language. Sensations, in this respect, deserve special attention as they are of primary importance in the formation of all the other perceptive processes, including language acquisition.

Complex approach which consists in the combination of functional and cognitive methods of investigation let us analyze the status of the category from different points of view: semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects.

Semantic analysis manifests that the integrative element for all the representatives of the category is the concept “sensation” which includes various types of perception. The organization of the category can be regarded in the form of a semantic macro-field. The structure of this field is module-like. All three modules are interwoven and enter each other. These are modules of Physical Sensations, Emotional Sensations and Mental Sensations. The central part of the first module is formed by the semantic fields of Visual, Olfactory, Tactile, Taste and Audile sensations. They are more or less stable and monosemantic. As far as the periphery is concerned, it is of more dynamic character and is represented by the semantic fields of Emotional and Mental sensations. These fields are of marginal character and possess a mixture of semantic characteristics.

As the results of the investigation show, the best representative of the category (prototype) is the verb “feel”, which is capable of nominating all the semantic fields due to its polysemy. Accordingly, its semantic structure coincides with the contents of the category as a whole, and can be regarded as its cognitive model.

The verb “feel” can verbalize the following types of physical sensations:

· Tactile: Your hair feels so soft (BNC).

· Taste: The raisins felt wrong to him (Carey).

· Olfactory: You could feel the cold limey smell of the stone at the back of your nostrils (Carey).

· Audile: They felt a continual light rain spray down from a vast brick building (Bradbury).

· Pain: Charles Paris felt a searing pain as a bullet ripped into his flesh (BNC).

· Temperature: What justifies us in attributing heat and cold to material things is our perceiving them to be hot and cold; and they could still feel hot and cold to us even if we never felt hot or cold ourselves (BNC).

· Interceptive:I feel sick / dizzy / hungry.

It can also denote emotional sensations. The existence of this concept was put forward by us, relying on the dictionary definitions such as «feel - have emotional sensations» (CGED) and informants’ data. Let us consider the following examples:

She felt cold and lonely (BNC).

The wind had dropped, and in spite of a thickening drizzle he felt hot and flustered (Darvill-Evans).

One can observe physical and emotional concepts revealed simultaneously by means of the verb “feel” and adjectives denoting physical sensation (cold) and emotional state (lonely). Such combinations manifest the close connection between these inner states and sometimes the impossibility to differentiate them.

The same verb is able to name the mental sensations of a human being. Employing the same method of definition analysis and informants inquiry it was established that there exists another marginal semantic field, interacting with the physical and emotional sensations concepts. As the example below manifests, the verb “feel” can refer to mental process:

He felt the truth of her words (BNC).

As we can see, the semantic diagram of the verb “feel” correlates with the structure of the category of Human Sensations. The diffusion in semantic fields corresponds to the psychic mechanisms of a human and contributes to the idea of egocentric nature of the human language.

On the syntactic level the metaphoric models of the category were investigated. The anthropomorphic metaphor SENSATION IS A HUMAN BEING has various ways of realization. In some contexts sensations can be regarded as an invader: A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time (Shelley). In the next example sensation is represented as an enemy: Her eyelids fluttered and she went deathly white, but she fought back the dizzying sensation, her hands coming up to brace herself against fitz Alan's chest while the world righted itself (Byrne).

Sometimes it is considered as a tormentor: I felt tormented by hunger and thirst (Shelley).

Zoomorphic model is realized in the metaphor SENSATION IS A LIVING BEING. Sensations twist and clench a person like a snake:

A terrible, hopeless shudder twisted through me (King).

An unexpected clenching sensation in the region of her heart shocked her (Bauling).

I remember a sensation like a slug or a snake, something vile entering me, and I remember vomiting (BNC).

Next model presents sensations as an object. By means of the verbs of motion pass, run, come, go the metaphor SENSATION IS A MOVING OBJECT is actualized:

Masklin thought he felt heavy for a moment, but then the sensation passed (Pratchett).

The sensation that ran through her body into her limbs weakened and scared her (BNC).

Thus the early discomfort is described by one author as «a sensation of tingling or pricking which comes and goes suddenly, as if a fly were settling down» (BNC).

In some contexts the category is actualized in the artifact metaphor SENSATION IS A TOY:

For some young people there is the attraction of playing with a new physical sensation (BNC).

Abstract model SENSATION IS DIFFICULTY, ORDEAL manifests the understanding of it as something intolerable and insurmountable:

Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me: but sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations (Shelley).

Human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union (Shelley).

From pragmatic point of view, the linguistic units of the category of Human Sensations represent the evaluation of the perceptive experiences in terms of universal evaluative adjectives such as good / bad, hedonistic lexemes pleasant / unpleasant, affective words great, delightful, delicious / terrible, horrible awful, etc.

Positive or negative evaluation of sensation may be rational or irrational. In the example below one can observe rational positive evaluation, as the cause of pleasant sensations correlates with the normal process of sensual experience:

And that was a delightful and most alarming sensation, when the long, airy arms of the West Wind reached down through the trees and caught him up, and the leaves were all shivering and clattering and trembling with her passing, and the straws danced before the house and the dust rose and flew about in little earth-fountains (Byatt).

The cause of the sensation is represented by means of anthropomorphic metaphor (West Wind caught him up, leaves were shivering and clattering and trembling, straws danced, dust rose and flew) which depicts natural phenomena.

Negative rational evaluation is observed in the following example, where the cause of the sensation is pain which is normal situation in real life:

The pain was bad. I had not felt anything like that since then. Not that I was complaining, you understand; I don't think people should have feelings like that often (King).

Irrational evaluation can be found in the contexts, where the cause of normally positive sensations results in negative evaluation or vice versa: Carrie felt cold, though it was a warm day and above their heads, above the dark yews, the sun was still shining (BNC). Irrational correlation of the cause and effect of perceptive experience demonstrates the individual, egocentric character of evaluation as human cognitive process.

The attempt of modeling the semantic macro-field of the category of Human Sensations, the analysis of the main mechanisms of its conceptualization and categorization contribute to the study of egocentric categories and fulfill the semantic sphere of the human inner world analysis on the level of linguistics.

References

1. BNC - British National Corpus. – http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ (2009-2011).

2. CGED - Collins Gem English Dictionary. – Harper Collins Publishers, 1994. – 696 р.

1. Ivanova R. P. Egocentric categories: Human Sensations in Modern English language / Candidate of Philology dissertation: 10.02.04 – Russia: Irkutsk, 2009. – 193 p.

2. Lakoff G., Johnson M. Metaphors we live by. – Chicago, London: Univ. of Chicago press, 1980. – 256 p.

3. Malinovich Y. M. Semiosphere of the Human inner world: the problem of the Egocentric categories semantics // The scientific papers of the I international conference “Changing Russia: new paradigms and new methods in linguistics”. – Kemerovo, 2006. –P. 881-894.