The role of metaphorized verbal combinations in presenting the mental behaviour of a person in contemporary British prose

Abstract

Metaphors, being a special cognitive and semantic device, demonstrate the flow of the human thought. Among all parts of speech the verb can be singled out for its powerful ability to metaphorize. The paper addresses those verbal metaphorizers which come up in the contemporary literary English language to predicate the nouns related to human mental behavior. The contextual approach applied to the whole study has proved some basic ideas of the cognitive theory of knowledge. The study has identified some basic cognitive abilities, powers, states, feelings and emotions, and the ways they are presented in the literary texts in order to be guessed and understood by the readers.