Perceptual “Programming” of Language Meaning: Methodology and Basic Results

The present paper dwells on the problem of the interplay between perceptual and linguistic processes in semantics and aims at exploring the ways perceptual experience influences the construction of language meaning. The starting point of the research is the assumption about the existence of a certain algorithm in accordance with which the human perceptual experience is processed and transformed into the content of language signs. To test this hypothesis, a representative corpus of English and Russian phraseological units (more than 3000 units) is analyzed. The analysis carried out is based on the approaches to perception developed in the works by B.G. Anan’ev, M.I. Sechenov, and Charles Scott Sherrington and on information about perception presented in modern dictionaries on psychology, physiology, and philosophy, and, on the linguistic side, on the theory of linguocultural modeling of phraseological meaning, on the current data obtained in the sphere of the theory of conceptual metaphor, the theory of embodied meaning, and the theory of linguistic synesthesia. The investigation helps to bring out the links of meanings of the phraseological signs under consideration with various kinds of perception, i.e., exteroception, proprioception, interoception, and nociception. According to the research findings, traces of perceptual experience can be detected on all main levels of the phraseological meaning (i.e., at the deep and at the surface level). Various perceptual sensations serve as sources of the formation, first and foremost, of elementary constituents in the conceptual foundations of meanings of the phraseological units in question, then they help to shape phraseological images, and, finally, the semantic components of their semantic structure. In general, the analysis performed offers further evidence of the key role of human perceptual (embodied) experience in language meaning construal. It shows that perception, being a very complex system of mastering the world, not only “launches” the process of forming a certain meaning, but “programs” a particular way of its development.