The subject of interest of the author of the article is scent as a category present in Leśmian’s writings, in his essays, poetry and prose. Olfactory cognition, based on a primary, pre-language form of communication, undermines the status of speech not freed from tight bonds of logic and grammar, seems akin to Leśmian’s “song without words”. It also encourages attempts at restitution of an archaic worldview.
Experiential linguistics, which is focused on the description of sensual sensations, has emerged from cognitive sciences. The author undertakes the issue of verbalized smells, that is the names of perfume, by the author’s choice – the female ones. The discussed examples of perfume naming show the attempts of smell narrativization by applying names conveying great semantic and metaphorical (mini-metaphors) capacity that evoke “Proust effect”. As a exponent of the content richness, we may treat sensual synesthesia and imagery (cultural constructs, floral and geographical names, names connected with the cinema, entertainment, lifestyle, dissemination of a certain brand’s style, abstracts yielding to aestheticization, names connected with altered states of consciousness, names poetizing and additionally defining the image of a woman). The proposed categories of names allow to distract from their symbolic layers the most frequent connotations, due to which the name becomes a germ by (self)narration each time updated by a female user.
The article is devoted to the analysis of vocabulary concerning aromatic sensations in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s short stories. Discussing the world of fragrance sensations of Brzeziny author, I focus on elements of perception as a source of scent, ways of scent reception, the perceptor’s feelings and scent valuation by the experiencing subject. In the researched linguistic material, the most frequent sources of scent are: flowers, trees, grass, herbs, soil and human body. Within the lexis concerning olfactory sensations the most numerously exploited are word items scent and odor. Linguistic constructions use mainly a predicate to smell, which serves an euphemistic function with regard to unpleasant smells. The researched texts are characterized by an insignificant share of the vocabulary connotating pejorative evaluation of smell. The process f olfactory stimulants’ reception occurs in two manners. A passive perception prevails that is typical of man. It results from the collected material that scent is concretized by means of notion metaphors: “scent is air (wind)”, “scent is movement”, “scent is water”, and “scent is an enemy
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