Methodology for a Complex Description of an Idiostyle in the Aspect of the Theory of Imagery

The article presents a study on the problem of finding effective methodological principles for analyzing the writer's idiostyle. The aim of the article is to present the methodology for a complex description of an idiostyle based on the analysis of figurative units (metaphor, figurative word itself, comparison, etc.) realizing their potential in the literary text. The study is based on the methods of scientific description, contextual analysis, and it relies on the scientific provisions of the motivological direction of linguistics and the theory of lexical imagery (O.I. Blinova, E.A. Yurina, and others). It is emphasized that the choice of the subject of the analysis is determined by the originality and the particular nature of the figurative unit combining common language (connection with the culture of a certain ethnos, the epoch) and individual author's content in a synthesized form. The analysis is carried out on the material of the works of V.P. Astafiev ("Last Bow", "Tsar-Fish"). It is noted that the presented methodology can be applied to the study of the works of other writers provided the allocation of figurative units in their work as dominant. The methodology the authors used involves searching for objective methods of analysis and for description of the individual style of the writer, and it includes several stages. At the first stage, the statistical analysis of figurative units in the text is proposed. The objective is to determine the frequency of use and stylistic features of the figurative units of each type, to identify the individual author's "preferences" in their use. The criteria for determining the unit as figurative are given: motivation, semantic ambiguity, metaphoric inner form. The typology of metaphors based on the distinction of figurative units by their universality or occasionality, dependence or independence from the context is given. The cases of transformation of the structural-semantic status of the figurative unit under the influence of the contextual environment are noted. The second stage is the semantic analysis involving the unification of figurative units into semantic groups and the analysis of the main semantic processes. The vector of research in this case is aimed at identifying and describing the key and peripheral author's metaphorical models and priority stylistic techniques that characterize the writer's idiostyle. Particular attention is paid to the conceptual analysis of the text. The proposed methodology for describing the conceptosphere of the author's imaginative world includes defining the concept as meaningful for a given cultural ethnos, allocating the semantic zones of each concept, identifying the individual author's component in their structure, searching for the intersection zones of the semantic fields of concepts. In the conclusion of the article, the ways of practical application of the proposed methodology for analyzing idiostyles are given: when compiling dictionaries of the writer's figurative vocabulary and in the translation practice of the text into a foreign language.

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