METAPHORICAL IMAGE OF THE TRAGIC IN ENGLISH LITERARY TEXTS:LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS

Abstract

This article focuses on revealing stylistic devices and cognitive mechanisms which ensure the formation of verbal images in the English literary texts. The author suggests a methodology of cognitive analysis of English literary texts based on linguistic assumptions of poetics viewed from a cognitive perspective. The application of such analysis made it possible to form the world picture, typical of the tragedy, which unites its aspects, those of textual features, linguistic manifestations and conceptual patterns. The conceptual space of the tragic as an aspect of the respective world picture is claimed to be formed by literary concepts of the tragic as basic units of author’s artistic cognition conditioned by the understanding of the tragic and requirements of tragedy as a dramatic genre. It highlights cognitive mechanisms that lead to the emergence of new poetic images which cause a possible breakthrough in the conceptualization of the world. It is proved that the mechanisms of new metaphorical images formation in literary texts are predetermined by cognitive operations of mapping, extension and modification alongside with cognitive procedures of generalization, compression, intertextualization, and perspectivization. The integrative approach to the theory of imagery helped to update the techniques of conceptual analysis of verbal images and to work out the integrative cognitive model of verbal poetic image and image space reconstruction. The major manifestations of the metaphorical world of the tragic comprehension are considered to be biomorphic, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic metaphors. The cognitive operation of modification is defined as predominant in the creation of the metaphorical images of the tragedy because it is aimed at the transformation of the conventional conceptual metaphor, which leads to the emergence of novel senses.