Lexical synesthesia in Croatian

In the first part of the paper, we highlight fundamental insights into synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon and then focus on the linguistic interpretation of synesthesia as a lexical mechanism. In neurology synesthesia denotes a specific and rare human ability of joint perception which emerges from a congenital ability to integrate sensations. Neurologists single out five basic manifestations of neurological synesthesia: colored sequences, colored music, affective perceptions, nonvisual couplings and spatial sequences. The main impetus for neurological synesthesia is language, but neurological synesthesia is not the cognitive source for lexical synesthesia. Neurological synesthesia is the ability among the rare individuals to join together the sensations from various sensory domains into one unique sensation. Lexical synesthesia is the general language mechanism which enables the creation of secondary meanings of polysemous lexemes. We understand lexical synesthesia as the syntagmatic connection of the words whose primary lexical meanings relate to different sensory domains, whereby one of the elements of the syntagm retains its primary meaning while the other activates its secondary meaning and leaves its primary sensory domain. Research into lexical synesthesia is most often based on extracting congruent syntagms of adjectives and nouns from dictionaries and corpora of general language. On the basis of the Croatian syntagms extracted that comprise an adjective and a noun (e.g. topao glas ‘warm voice’, hladne boje ‘cold colors’, kiseo osmijeh ‘sour smile’, sladak miris ‘sweet smell’) we isolated the types of synesthetic transfer in Croatian and determined their frequency. Inspired by Stephen Ullmann’s insights into the dominant tendencies in the synesthetic transfers, we created hierarchy of sensory modalities for Croatian language: TOUCH → TASTE → SMELL → SIGHT → HEARING.