The main purpose of this study is to explore linguistic synaesthesia in Latin poetic language. Through the analysis of a poetic corpus, which consists of works of Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Vergil, all occurrences of twenty Latin synaesthetic adjectives (previously extracted by Aeneid and De Rerum Natura) were retrieved; all lemmas co-occurring with these adjectives in nominal phrases were then classified into the following categories according to their meaning in context: monoaesthetic, synaesthetic (touch, temperature perception, taste, smell, sight, motion perception, hearing), pseudo-synaesthetic (i.e. psycho-moral), abstract. The research not only shows how much linguistic synaesthesia is present in Latin poetry, but also demonstrates that Latin synaesthesias comply with cross-linguistic tendencies, especially with regard to the hypothesis of directional hierarchy.
La sinestesia linguistica nella poesia latina
Irene De Felice
2014
Abstract
The main purpose of this study is to explore linguistic synaesthesia in Latin poetic language. Through the analysis of a poetic corpus, which consists of works of Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Vergil, all occurrences of twenty Latin synaesthetic adjectives (previously extracted by Aeneid and De Rerum Natura) were retrieved; all lemmas co-occurring with these adjectives in nominal phrases were then classified into the following categories according to their meaning in context: monoaesthetic, synaesthetic (touch, temperature perception, taste, smell, sight, motion perception, hearing), pseudo-synaesthetic (i.e. psycho-moral), abstract. The research not only shows how much linguistic synaesthesia is present in Latin poetry, but also demonstrates that Latin synaesthesias comply with cross-linguistic tendencies, especially with regard to the hypothesis of directional hierarchy.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
