SOUND SYMBOLISM AS A PHONETIC PHENOMENON AND A MEANS OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
The research is devoted to the phenomenon of sound symbolism in the language. Various approaches to defining the essence of the phenomenon and its status in contemporary linguistics are discussed. The authors explain ‘crossmodal correspondence' within sound symbolism, which may form a subject area for researches both in the field of linguistics and in the field of psychology. The cross-modal correspondence occurring between sound and semantic components of sound-symbolic words is presented by the authors as a justification factor for the scientific significance of the phonosemantic theories and further attempts to detect and to study non-arbitrary connections between sound and meaning of a linguistic sign. An important feature of the work lies in the expansion of the classification approach of sound-symbolic language units. It is suggested to add a pragmatic component to the analysis of units' semantics and formal phonetic structure. Therefore, three types of sound symbolism are distinguished and analyzed in this work by the authors relying on the conventional classification approaches: Phonaestheme-containing Sound Symbolism; Particularistic Sound Symbolism; Ideophones. Finally, the authors emphasize heuristic potential of phonaesthetics - an unformalized direction of linguistics about the beauty of the sound of a language, which was first described by J.R.R. Tolkien in connection with the phonetic techniques applied in ‘Hobbit' and ‘Lord of the Rings', e.g., the use of certain phonetics in languages of different races. It is concluded that phonaesthetics may expand the dual cross-modality of sound symbolism, since it involves the study of the subjective category of the beauty of sound.