Authors
- Khalikovа Natalia Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor
Annotation
The paper looks into a verbal image from the structural and semantic perspective. The verbal image is viewed as part of a text, a complex syntactic phenomenon. It is argued that verbal images of similar semantics form cognitive perception classes: landscape, interior, portrait, action, state, etc.
Content-wise a verbal image is an individual model of perception based on value constants, which is adapted by an author / narrator to an idiosyncratic map of the world. In literature verbal images take shape of I.S. Turgenev’s and I.A. Bunin’s landscapes, portraits by A.P. Chekhov or V.V. Nabokov.
The imagery constant – «X is smiling / laughing» – is a stable formal semantic element of description, yet variability of speech turns it into a verbal image. This view on the verbal image explains why the style of a certain writer becomes recognizable. Thus, a summer landscape is depicted differently in terms of semantics and structure in works of any prominent writer: A.S. Pushkin, I.S. Turgenev, A.P. Chekhov, F.K. Sologub, etc. Still, the approach to describing a landscape is pretty much the same. Every writer arguably develops his / her own vision of some archetype of nature. As A.F. Losev pointed out, «artistic form is a personality in the form of a symbol or a symbol in the form of a personality». The imagery of any fragment of any landscape is based on the same structural footing.
Secondly, the verbal image is similar to a word and makes part of fiction literature vocabulary. Its semantics can be defined within the imagery framework: a flower – a living being, light, space. Common cognitive metaphors are used to store and broadcast aesthetic phenomena in fiction.
Conceptual fields in prosaic and poetic language are built with the same basic structural descriptive units (imagery constants and frameworks).
This approach to interpreting a verbal image makes the groundwork of the general theory of imagery and might be instrumental in analyzing the imagery of big-size texts. In the last few decades imagery frameworks as semantic units of fiction have been compiled in special dictionaries, e. g. Dictionary of poetic images by N.V. Pavlovich.