LINGUOCOGNITIVE REALIZATION OF GHOST IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE ABOUT THE SUPERNATURAL (BASED ON GHOST STORY, GOTHIC NOVEL AND FANTASY GENRES)

Abstract

The article reveals the research of ghosts in the English literature about the supernatural and presents the analysis of realization of their peculiarities at the lingual and cognitive levels in the English literary works of such genres as ghost story, gothic novel and fantasy. In the process of research the attention was focused on the analysis of the nominative aspect of verbalization of ghosts, namely lexico-semantic space, along with the structuring of the basic information got as a result of analysis of the contexts, where ghosts were mentioned, and presented as a frame of the notional layer of the literary concept ghost. The methodology of the investigation presupposes the application of the complex approach which is based on the linguopoetic and conceptual analysis. The lingual aspects of variety of ghosts in the literary works of Ch. Dickens, O. Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, where the category of the imaginary expressed by these ghosts is realized the best, and where it is the genre-forming feature, thus were analysed. On the basis of system-functional and semantic analysis it became possible to differentiate and group words that verbalize the variety of ghosts in the analysed literary works. The logically structured information about these creatures reveals the basic mental visualization of the phenomenon, its components, the interaction of which is presented in the form of a frame, and demonstrates the knowledge about the ghosts accumulated in the English ghost story, gothic novel and fantasy. The present investigation shows common features of the ghost as one of the brightest examples of realization of the imaginary category in literature and reveals its supernatural manifestation in the English ghost story, gothic novel and fantasy.