Phonosymbolism and Motivation of Word in Literary Text

The paper considers the role of phonosemantics in the process of adaptation of loan words and proper names in the Russian language. The authors have aimed to trace what factors – proper linguistic and extralinguistic – influence the development of the Russian language vocabulary. Special attention has been paid to the phenomenon of “folk etymology” (“reetymologization”) described at the time by representatives of the Kazan linguistic school. The conditions necessary for the loan word to assimilate in the target language and to successfully function in it have also been considered. The importance of phonetic motivation for loan words due to the absence of any other types of motivation during the transition from language to language has been emphasized. The paper focuses on studying of the relativeness of sound and meaning in the language consciousness. Currently, this relativeness has been theoretically substantiated and experimentally proved by both foreign and Russian researchers (N.I. Gorelov, A.P. Zhuravlev, S.V. Voronin, et al.). In fiction, the idea of sound and color are often closely linked. “Color writing” has been used by various authors. The resulting feeling was named “synesthesia”, the term which is also utilized in psycholinguistics. The theoretical findings of the paper have been confirmed by examples from different literary texts belonging to different epochs, the authors of which create images through phonetic motivation for this or that loan words and proper names. In addition, acronyms characteristic for the language of the 1920 – 1930s have been also investigated, as well as abstract nouns. The results of the analysis allow concluding that the sound filling corresponds to the conceptual content for most of the studied vocabulary.