Grigory Kreydlin
Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia
Lidia Khesed
Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia
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Published in: Proceedings of the 4th European and 7th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication (MMSYM 2016), Copenhagen, 29-30 September 2016
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 141:16, p. 120-128
Published: 2017-09-21
ISBN: 978-91-7685-423-5
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
The article presents a fragment of the semiotic conceptualization of the somatic object “hair ” in the Russian language and nonverbal code. We describe the meaning of the standard Russian nomination of hair – volosy, identify and analyze key features of hair (such as its size, shape, colour, structure, functions and dysfunctions), the meaning of these features and their standard Russian nominations. A separate part of the article is devoted to the gestures performed with hair, namely caressing and aggressive gestures. By the comparative analysis of verbal and nonverbal Russian sign units we explore connections between characteristics of hair and the corresponding communicative behavior of the person. Special attention is paid to the features of hair which are either semantically or culturally marked as their meanings reflect either social or cultural stereotypes peculiar to Russians. Observation of some Russian set phrases and idioms with the word volosy reveals the problem of literary translation of the corresponding texts into foreign languages.