Transformation of the Image of “Grasping” in Interlingual Transfer

The article is devoted to the analysis of the interlingual transformation of the English “grasping” image when translating metaphorically motivated collocations with abstract nouns belonging to the hidden class of small objects (the cryptotype Res Parvae) into Russian. The research is based on data from the Russian‑English parallel subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The analysis includes contexts with the classifiers cast, catch, grab, grasp, grip, pick, seize, throw combined with abstract nouns selected according to the description of cryptotypes in O. O. Boriskina’s work. The aim of the study is to identify the main ways of transforming the original metaphorical image in the Russian language and to determine the most productive semantic models that replace it. The conducted analysis has shown that the “grasping” image is preserved in translation only in 20 % of cases. In the remaining examples, it is either replaced by other metaphorical models or completely erased. The most productive types of remetaphorization in Russian include: verbs of motion and spatial dynamics; verbs of sensory and cognitive perception; verbs denoting possession, loss, speech activity, and causation. The obtained results allow us to consider the identified transformations as a systemic manifestation of differences in the categorization of abstract entities in the English and Russian languages

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