Conceptual Metaphor «Human Being – Nature» In Literary Text: Pragmatics and Functions

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the anthropocentrism of the modern scientific paradigm of linguistics and the need to establish correlations of the constituents of linguistic consciousness and objects of the external world in the structuring and functioning of the conceptual metaphor in the literary text. Conceptual metaphor is a mental topological projection of interacting areas of linguistic consciousness and the surrounding world. The purpose of the article is to study the functional and pragmatic potential of metaphorical models built on the basis of the conceptual metaphor «Human Being – Nature» in a literary text. The material for the study was the literary texts of the novels of I.S. Turgenev’s “Rudin”, “Fathers and Sons”, “Smoke”, “Virgin Soil”, containing representative metaphorical micro and macro contexts. The complex of research methods includes the method of continuous sampling, deductive-inductive method, conceptual analysis, and the method of linguistic interpretation. The functions of metaphorical contexts, which are based on the conceptual metaphor Human - Nature, consist in the possibility of representing the inner world of characters, their general cultural potential, social status and origin; the use of metaphors in the speech of characters (external and internal) allows us to talk about the figurative perception of the world by these heroes, about the level of their emotionality and linguistic creativity, since metaphors are a kind of human thinking patterns. Analysis of the implementation of the conceptual metaphor «Human Being- Nature» in a literary text allows one to discover and describe the priority cognitive structures of the author’s linguistic consciousness and values inherent in the individual author’s picture of the world. Research prospects are in the possibility of identifying priority conceptual metaphors in the individual author’s picture of the world on the basis of literary texts in order to identify and describe the dominants of linguistic consciousness and the value picture of the world of a particular author