STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC ASPECTS OF METAPHOR IN THE POETIC DISCOURSE OF PETRO SOROKA

Abstract

The article investigates the metaphorical space of poems collection «Frankincense of Autumn» by Ternopil artist, writer and literary critic Petro Soroka. The research subject is structural and semantic aspects of metaphorical constructions. The aim of the article is to determine structural and semantic features of metaphors in Petro Soroka’s poetic discourse. To achieve this, the author defines and specifies semantic and stylistic types of poetic metaphors; identifies image units structural features in the writer’s work. The analysis is based on descriptive method (selection and systematization of relevant material, observation of linguistic facts, their interpretation and generalization), semantic and stylistic method, contextual-interpretive method and also quantitative technique (to establish a frequency of different groups of metaphors). The study of Petro Soroka’s poetic discourse demonstrates complexity of associations that underlay individual authorial metaphors, and functioning of complex, extended metaphorical structures with authorial intellectualism. Poems present all of the semantic and stylistic types of metaphors. However, the factual material analysis indicates rareness of objectifiment and synesthetic metaphors. 87% of all metaphors are personifications, among which the most frequent are anthropomethaphors (79 %). Other personifications are zoometaphors (7 %), botanometaphors (13.5 %) and chimerometaphors (approximately 0.5 %). High number of anthropometaphors is caused by a person as a central image in Petro Soroka’s artistic world and focusing on feelings, emotions, experiences and inner state in general. Other lexical and phraseological features in the artist’s language world demand further research.