VERBALIZATION OF THE MOURNING MOTIVE: LEXICAL-SEMANTIC FIELD AND SYNONYMIC ROWS IN THE LYRICS OF EUROPEAN MODERNIST POETS (BASED ON THE POETRY OF T. HARDY, A. E. HOUSMAN, R. BRIDGES, AND I. FRANKO)

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive linguistic and poetic analysis of the verbalization of the mourning motive in the creative heritage of prominent European modernist figures at the turn of the 20th century – Thomas Hardy, Alfred Edward Housman, Robert Bridges, and Ivan Franko. The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to rethink the phenomenon of suffering in the modern text, treating it as a fundamental coordinate of the artistic world that shapes the structure of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of the research is based on the distinction between the psychological aspect of the “feeling of loss” and its linguistic objectification in the form of the “mourning motive,” which allows for the elimination of terminological inconsistencies in the analysis of the object and subject of the study. Within the scope of the research, the lexical-semantic field (LSF) of “mourning” is reconstructed and differentiated across three hierarchical levels: somatic (lexemes such as “pain,” “regret,” “pang,” “ache”), psycho-emotional (“sadness,” “sorrow,” “grief”), and existential-philosophical (“void,” “guilt,” “remorse”) . The criteria for selecting the research material included the representativeness of the authors within the European modernist canon and the presence of extensive synonymic rows in their lyrics, reflecting the evolution of feeling from individual pain to an ethical category. Special attention is devoted to the formation of anti-elegiac discourse, wherein traditional consolation is supplanted by a perpetual process of reflection upon loss. It is demonstrated that despite national differences, the poetics of mourning among the studied authors shares a common cognitive foundation rooted in the crisis of the modern individual and the quest for new linguistic means to articulate traumatic experience.