Author’s name:
Yuliya S. Kholmanskikh – Ural State University of Railway Transport, Ekaterinburg, Russia
Abstract:
The article presents the experience of applying the method of binary oppositions to reconstruct the cognitive features of the ultimate concept “language” in poetic discourse. The study identifies the specificity of the aforementioned concept, located at the upper level of the “continuum of abstractness.” It also systematizes the ways of representing the concept “language” in the English texts of K. Sandburg, R. Graves, and S. Dunn, which have not previously been interpreted in Russian and which are characterized by a combination of metalinguistic and literary components. It is assumed that binary oppositions as a way of objectifying the cognitive features of the concept “language” not only reflect its individual authorial perception but also act as the basic principle for constructing the content of the concept. It is argued that, in the course of verbal representations, language is endowed with empirically perceptible attributes related to perceptual experience gained during the individual’s prior sensorimotor activity. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that examining the contextual representations of the universal concept “language” allows us to expand our understanding of the linguistic world-image as a whole. In addition, dictionaries of concepts and linguacultural thesauri are enriched with new data. Reasoning from the particular to the general, one can understand how various oppositional forms of verbalization of the same conceptual structure interact in its content according to the principle of complementarity, creating a holistic representation of the object.
The study demonstrates that the image of language in poetry reflects the duality inherent in it as a linguistic phenomenon, which is expressed in the existence of a number of cognitive characteristics: freedom — limitation, objectivity — subjectivity, sensual — abstract, natural (spontaneous) — human (artificial), variability — stability, individual — transcultural, denotative meaning — sense, indexical — symbolic. In the texts under consideration, language appears as an effective mechanism for human adaptation to the world, a means of forming and representing mental space, a tool for experiencing reality and transmitting socio-cultural experience, drawing the speaker into a universal labyrinth of transcultural symbols. In conclusion, the author emphasizes the importance of the method of binary oppositions as an effective research tool for systematizing and generalizing linguistic facts through the prism of individual authorial vision.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2026-73-1-150-162 |
| Downloads | 14 |
| Key words | method of binary oppositions; cognitive-discourse analysis; conceptual metaphor; linguistic abstraction; English-language poetry |