PECULIARITIES OF THE PROTAGONIST’S EMOTIONAL STATES METAPHORICAL EXPLICATION IN DONNA TARTT’S NOVEL “THE GOLDFINCH”

Abstract

The article analyzes metaphorical transference as one of the productive ways of explaining the emotional state of the protagonist in an artistic text. The study focused on the analysis of metaphor-symbol and linguistic metaphor, as well as an attempt to identify common cognitive mechanisms that work in their formation have been made, which confirms the validity of the claim that both linguistic and literary metaphor can be analyzed using the common cognitive toolkit. Metaphorical transfer is one of the productive ways of expressing emotions, since the latter are in the sphere of the abstract, difficult to explain, so often involve associations with objects specific, or something of direct human experience. In the text of the novel, this way is also a reflection of the main character’s efforts to find himself after the tragedy and the misfortunes that have fallen to his lot. Metaphorical transference in this case is two-dimensional, having a plan of content – psychological processes of rethinking reality and a plan of expression – a linguistic relationship between the components that act as a manifestation of these psychological processes in speech. Emotional states in a text are explicated either through the metaphor directly or through descriptions of circumstances, states, gestures, environments that accompany one or another emotion, where mechanisms of metaphorical transfer at the level of metaphor-symbol and at the level of linguistic metaphor are involved, both of which combining common cognitive mechanisms and can be delineated within the following models: EMOTION – WATER; EMOTION – MUD; EMOTION – SENT; EMOTION – MOVEMENT; EMOTION – SPACE; EMOTION – ARTEFACT; EMOTION – ZOOMORPHIC METAPHOR; EMOTION – LIGHT, etc. It is the metaphor that helps to verbalize the emotions and emotional states of the protagonist, engaging direct experience, combining the abstract and the concrete and emphasizing their complex cognitive structure. This way of comprehending the emotional experience is extremely productive and emphasizes that, while exploring the text of a work of art, emotion reveals its rich and subtle structure and complex content.