Literary Conceptualization from Cognitive Stylistic Perspective (Based on William Wordsworth’s Poetry)

Additional information

Author Information:

Romanyshyn Nataliia, Associate Professor of the Department of applied Linguistics of Lviv National Polytechnic University. Correspondence: nataliya.romanyshyn@gmail.com

Citation:

Romanyshyn, N. Literary Conceptualization from Cognitive Stylistic Perspective (Based on William Wordsworth’s Poetry) [Text] // Linhvistychni Studiyi / Linguistic Studies : collection of scientific papers / Vasyl' Stus Donetsk National University; Ed. by Zhanna Krasnobaieva-Chorna. Vinnytsia : Vasyl' Stus DonNU, 2020. Vol. 39. Pp. 83-97. ISBN 966-7277-88-7

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31558/1815-3070.2020.39.7

Publication History:

Volume first published online: June 01, 2020

Article received: March 01, 2020, accepted: March 15, 2020 and first published online: June 01, 2020

Annotation.

статті розглянуто підходи до розкриття особливостей художньої концептуалізації з перспективи когнітивної стилістики. Процес художньої концептуалізації розглянуто в аспекті рецептивної естетики, що постулює активну участь читача у процесах розгортання смислової структури художнього тексту в межах комунікативно-пізнавальної та творчо-інтерпретативної діяльності, та когнітивної стилістики. Матеріалом дослідження стали твори англійського поета-романтика Вільяма Вордсворта. У фокусі дослідження постає сукупність художніх поетичних концептів, що належать до концептосфери «батьківщина», актуалізованих системою просторових образів.

Keywords: literary text, discourse, literary concept, literary conceptualization, literary / poetic image, William Wordsworth.

Abstract.

LITERARY CONCEPTUALIZATION FROM COGNITIVE STYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE (BASED ON WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POETRY)

Nataliia Romanyshyn

Department of applied Linguistics of Lviv Polytechnic national University, Lviv, Ukraine.

Abstract

Background. Nowadays the researches in textual semantics are characterized by implementation of cognitive approaches as a scientific vector that enables the revealing of the correlations of verbal structures with the structures of human consciousness in the process of text creation and interpretation.

The purpose of the presented article is to substantiate the concept creative and cognitive nature of poetic language by analyzing semantic resources of verbal poetic image, character of poetic form from cognitive stylistics perspective. The process of reconstructing author’s conceptual system was based on the analysis of spatial-anthropocentric concepts Motherland and Native Land in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Results. The reconstruction of the literary conceptualization processes conducted according to the elaborated sequence of methods and procedures, taking into consideration of systemic unity of textual form and content, allowed to create a semantic model the discussed concepts. Thus, the structure of the concepts’ content includes features that expose the concepts of motherland and native land as ambivalent in terms of emotional perception and evaluation. The specificity of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in the subtly elaborated ethnographic and naturalness of the space, foregrounding the idea of the indissolubility of individual destiny and the processes of social transformation of the ethnic environment. The space of the native land can be either favourable, beneficial or aggressive, devouring, functioning both as a symbol of unavoidable transformations and stagnation. The dynamics of space transformations in the plane of textual actualization is embodied in fuzziness of the boundary between poetically reflected existential notions.

Discussion. The problem of literary conceptualization needs further analysis due to its complexity. The further research in the field of cognitive stylistics involves the elaboration of effective methods and mechanisms of revealing cognitive processes underlying the encoding and decoding of stylistically relevant information securing the actualization of the concept in different types of texts.

Keywords: literary text, discourse, literary concept, literary conceptualization, literary / poetic image, William Wordsworth.

Vitae

Nataliia Romanyshyn is the Associate Professor of the Department of applied Linguistics of Lviv National Polytechnic University. Arias of interest include stylistics, poetics, cognitive poetics, narratology, pragmatics, discourse studies.

Correspondence: nataliya.romanyshyn@gmail.com

Vitae

Anatoliy P. Zahnitko, Doctor of Philology, Professor, Head of Department of Ukrainian Language and Applied Linguistics in Donetsk National University. His areas of research interests include functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, comparative linguistics, categorical linguistics, lexicographic linguistics, and text linguistics.

Article.

Nataliia Romanyshyn

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5918-5423

DOI 10.31558/1815-3070.2020.39.7

УДК 81‘373

LITERARY CONCEPTUALIZATION FROM COGNITIVE STYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE (BASED ON WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POETRY)

У статті розглянуто підходи до розкриття особливостей художньої концептуалізації з перспективи когнітивної стилістики. Процес художньої концептуалізації розглянуто в аспекті рецептивної естетики, що постулює активну участь читача у процесах розгортання смислової структури художнього тексту в межах комунікативно-пізнавальної та творчо-інтерпретативної діяльності, та когнітивної стилістики. Матеріалом дослідження стали твори англійського поета-романтика Вільяма Вордсворта. У фокусі дослідження постає сукупність художніх поетичних концептів, що належать до концептосфери «батьківщина», актуалізованих системою просторових образів.

Ключові слова: художній текст, дискурс, художній концепт, художня концептуалізація, художній / поетичний образ, Вільям Вордсворт.

Introduction. For decades the linguistic discussion concerning the literary semantics problems has been developing from different positions and focusing on different issues, in particular, the questions of literary concept content and the ways of its revealing (the works of Vorobyova O., Nikonova V., Selivanova E., Kaganovs'ka O., Belekhova L., Bekhna I., Semino E., Stockwell P. etc.). The literary concept as a dynamic component of literary picture of the world is characterized by semantic diversity, interpretative limitedness, aesthetic value, it has culturally and socially determined content. Literary concept differs from the cultural one in its creative, emotional, psychological nature, spheres of functioning, mode of author’s individual cognition and verbalization.

Existing in a certain idiosphere, which is a part of author’s individual literary picture of the world, determined by the scope of individual poetic associations, literary concepts emerge and develop as a response to a previous lingual and cultural experience of a creative person and express author’s individual reconsideration of objects and events, their potential content exists on the junctions of different lines of culture – historical, social, everyday, literary, philosophic – and that is why it is maximally concentrated, volumetric, complex structured, it represents those forms of cognition that “slip out” of philosopher’s pen (Stambovsky) and become the wisdom “trapped by a poetic word” (Maslova 31).

Consequently, modern studies of literary semantics and literary conceptualization foreground those researches of text literary-poetic resources that are directed to the penetration into the deep structure of stylistic and broader poetic /literary device as a form of knowledge presentation and an instrument of revealing and explaining cognitive strategies and processes underlying the formation and interpretation of a literary text as a product of cognizing subject’s creative activity in socio-cultural, historical, political and aesthetic context (Vorobyova “Khudozhestveiennya siemantika”; Dolezel; Freeman 2002).

Background. While modeling the literary concept scholars argue that it is possible to comprehend its structure on the basis of interdisciplinary approach that involves the integration of linguistic, cultural and literary aspects, which enables both the penetration into the unity of literary world of the text and the world of national culture, and the extension of the boundaries of literary concept representation among which the leading role belongs to the poetic word “as a manifestation of lingual creative activity of Homo Sapiens determined by the aspiration to interpret the world by means of verbal-imagery codes” (Malenko 5) as a means of spiritually-practical comprehension of the world which rest on the resources of imagery consciousness of a human being and the processes of poetic generalizations.

Comprehension of the essence of the poetic language, in particular, its concept creative function, its value in the processes of creative cognizing of the world and conceptualizations in correlation with the specificity of ethnic consciousness is a leading epistemological principle of previous and contemporary researches. Semantic limitedness of the poetic act, contextual dependence of the word’s meaning are the basic essence of the poetic language; the “conditions of referent-recipient duality of the author and the reader” (Malenko 23) is its important sense creating aspect. The recipient as a co-participant of the sense creative act, that is verbally encoded in the poetic text, appears to be an active subject of literary communication (Vinogradov “O tieorii hudozhestvennoi riechi” 8). A considerable value of context in creating the semantics of a verbal sign, the phenomenon of inner and outer form of the image, indissolubility of cognitive and emotional processes in a literary creativity, specific nature of perception of lingual-aesthetic signs by an individual and collective / national recipient influence the poetic actualization of concepts, creating the effect of parallelism between thematic/conceptual and semantic planes of the text (Vinogradov “O yazykie zhudozhestviennoy litiratury” 14). Object-topical difference of the words which do not conform semantically to a single notional or emotional vector in creating verbal-imagery model may therefore produce a complete literary impression which allows the author to obtain limitless ability of literary embodiment of concepts on the basis of multidimensional semantic potential of the word (Malenko 31–32). An active and conscious transformation of the language means reveals itself in ways of organizing already existing and newly created language elements, their selection, arrangement and usage. Additional sense which they obtain in a dynamic structure of the literary text depends both on their potential expressiveness in the structure of language and on the acquired intratextual connections in the text’s plot and composition.

Domestic and foreign linguistics, revealing important aspects of poetic language creativity, especially its psychological backgrounds (Vygotsliy; Jung), unity of the form and content, idiostylistic aspects, compositional types, phonological, lexico-semantic, expressive, stylistic and syntactic peculiarities intensified the cognitive essence of the poetic image, its ability to become an inexhaustible source of experience (Eko 106). In the poetic diction a word used by the author is subjected to semantic transformations, obtains new aesthetic features and turns into the element of literary content. The comprehension of the cognitive character of lingual-poetic thinking which in its different variants and in different epochs for centuries has been a guiding principle in scholastic aspiration to explain the nature of poetic creativity as an act of aesthetic mastering of the world, the identification of a principal parallelism between the processes of creation and reception of the poetic text and creation and reception of natural language elements is of great importance for the exposing the specificity of poetic conceptualization of the world. Poetic conceptualization of the world leads to as substantial results as language and scientific (Vygotsliy 38) with the only difference – the accentuating of its sensual, emotional, subjective aspect rather than purely rational, objective one (Humboldt 349–350).

Poetry, according to Y. Lotman, is a special language accustomed to the modeling and transference of information that secures the realization of cognitive acts, appealing to the spheres of intuitive, existential, inventive knowledge, is characterized by modeling nature manifested in creation of specific poetic image of the world (Lotman 243). The objectively existing world is transformed through the prism of its subjective comprehension by a creative personality.

Potentially and virtually each poetic word bears an imprint of the cultural unity, preserves a distinct footprint of typical collective conceptions that determine for the author the conditions of its (word’s) contextual actualization, since all possible constructive elements of poetic language “are marked by primary, pre-textual aesthetic nature and a powerful supply of artistic merit before it entered the author’s text” (Kalashnik 270). Transcending this “resistance of the language” (Stanyts'ka 13) in verbalization of the poetic idea, the author resorts to the original language forms capable of reflecting the uniqueness of individual aesthetic experience. In the act of artistic creativity the word is being individualized, raised over its meaning, get inspired emotionally and expressively impregnated forming a united syncretic aesthetic and psychological complex of creative cognition.

Purpose. The article is aimed at substantiating the concept creative and cognitive nature of poetic language by analyzing idiostylistic and semantic resources of verbal poetic image, character of poetic form as an important element of individual poetics from cognitive stylistics perspective, proceeding from the assumption that semantic features of verbal images reproduce cognitive feature of literary concepts, produce literary valuable material relevant for exposing individual world outlook dominants, dynamics of existential axiology in the structure of literary concept. Thus, the decoding of the poetic structure of a literary work/set of works in a certain profile, reconstruction of author’s individual language consciousness and language usage taking into consideration the personalized internal textual and external textual experience secures the penetration into the totality of literary concept’s semantic features that embody both the general cultural experience and author’s mental world.

The topicality of the research is determined by the general direction of modern linguistics toward the theoretical and practical consideration of poetic creativity, in particular the conceptual aspects of textual semantics as a reflection of author’s individual aesthetic experience in correlation with the development of aesthetic consciousness of ethnic community; the search for new interdisciplinary direction of the study of language, culture, cognition. We proceed from the assumption about the correlation of the dynamics of cultural-historic paradigm and creative cognition, cognitive power of verbal poetic image.

Results

Methodology. Formation of poetic image as a representative of literary concept is the selection of entities with a relevant emotional and aesthetic evaluation and simultaneous binding of this evaluation both in the conceptual system of literature as a subsystem of culture and in the mental space of the whole culture, thus, for the author the ways of conceptual system development are versatile. The exposure of the concept creative potential of poetic images in the cognitive aspect presupposes the unity of lingual poetic, cognitive poetic, cognitive stylistic, pragmatic and semiotic perspective as well as the consideration of literary studies.

This scientific position concerning the active, creative and influencing power of poetic language correlates with the acknowledgement of the leading role of a human being in its (poetic language’s) existence – the human factor in the creating and decoding of poetic senses. Anthropocentric dimension in treatment of language, language-literary creativity and reception presupposes that in the research of poetic language as a component of the communicative act between the author and the reader the extrapolation of scholar’s model of the world on the author’s model of the world is of great importance which allows to admit a certain degree of subjectivity in developing the model of literary concept. Consequently, numerous researches in poetic conceptualization (Nikonova; Kaganovs'ka; Belekhova) are based on a highly productive (in terms of literary semantics revealing) the poetic-interpretative methodology that provides a wide space for individual analytical interpretation of formal and semantic parameters of poetic text without any limitations in the choice of a certain intentional dominant or analytical vector and fosters the formations of a corresponding system of means and devices, methods and procedures necessary for the exposure of the poetic word semantics in certain genres parameters by integration of stylistic, lingual poetic, semiotic, hermeneutic and cognitive approaches.

The synthesis of linguistic disciplines, interdisciplinary character of scientific research has a considerable importance both in reconstruction of author’s individual conceptual space and in modeling of separate literary concepts and correlates with the general theoretical postulate about the unity of form and content. The plane of literary text content is a complex unity of interrelated notions that includes

– objective-historic content;

– ideas and ideological content reflecting author’s individual attitude to the depicted events and phenomena, his conclusions, evaluations, sympathy or antipathy;

– direct content fixed in the text by verbal-imagery and literary-imagery means that encompass the theme, plot and composition, characters, acts, experience of protagonists, etc.

Literary analysis, first and foremost, is directed to the revealing the ideological and thematic foundations of the literary work, exposing the versatility of addressed questions and the ways of their artistic solution (Timofieev 129–142), character of text critical reception against a certain historic and cultural background. This information of literary critical plane is substantial in identification of the key literary hyper- and macro-concepts both of the idiostyle and of literary-artistic trend, it provides the researcher, directly or indirectly, with the “clues” to uncovering the literary conceptualization of key notions of linguistic culture.

Each literary work is a complex unity organized as a sequence of elements. Irrespective of size and genre of the text its systemic organization that constitutes its compositional essence originates from a certain content developing in the sequence of events, circumstances, acts, emotions – a set of textual elements that create the plot (Timofieev 156). The scheme of the plot of any text irrespective of the genre is not monolithic and can be easily divided into a set of elements that exist in certain connections and create a motive as a highest stage of generalization of the idea. The analysis of the plot and motive from the perspective of their sense, typology, axiology, historic aspect (as their similarity, recurrence in different authors and in different epochs) provides a key to the conceptual content embodied in them that remains unified being transferred from one historic environment to the other, retains its generalizing function in profiling definite human features, regularities and life events.

Consequently, the comprehension of plot-compositional structure of the literary work and revealed by it typicality and individualization of images are inseparable from the comprehension of the conceptual structure of the literary work as a whole and the model of literary concept in particular. In our research, thus, we suggest that the revealing of the process of literary conceptualization develops according to two reciprocal analytical cycles:

1. analysis of ideological and thematic content that turns into the analysis of the plot and composition in their unity with the system of literary images outside of which both the plot and the composition are merely general void structures. The analysis of the plot and composition turns into the plane of verbal embodiment analysis – verbal images and poetic language with a corresponding accent on lexical, syntactic, tropeic, stylistic canvas of the text, with a specific attention being paid to the slightest literary detail, symbol, etc.;

2. analysis of the language of the poetic text as a result of lingual means selection by the author motivated by a concrete aesthetic and cognitive tasks, as the specific character of the poetic language can be comprehended in identifying its role in the imagery system. The actualization of the poetic word creates the world of complex correlations, interactions and connections that change their structural forms, their subject-semantic or characterological features in the dynamic process of the development of the plot and transference of its separate areas. In this respect the language of the poetic work is considered as a form concerning the verbal image, and the verbal image as a form concerning the ideological-conceptual content. The analysis of the poetic language then turns into the analysis of the plot and composition, the specificity of the system of literary images (when it is necessary the protagonists speech and actions as a means of literary portraying), which opens the perspective to generalizing about ideological-thematic content of the work.

Consequently, the analysis of the literary conceptualization is inseparable from the analysis of the unity of textual form and content, their interrelations, transmutation and the integrity of all aspects of literary/poetic creativity. Solely verbal and solely content matter is insufficient as a source of conclusions concerning the conceptual senses. Thus, the reconstruction of the literary conceptualization processes in the systemic unity of textual form and content presupposes the sequence of the following procedures

– identification of content filling of micro- and macro contexts by defining their thematic dominants. As a rule the dominant thematic line / thematic lines correspond to the nomination of a corresponding literary concept and are identified in the result of informational reduction of the context, the analysis of the strong positions, types of foregrounding, identification of the key words, defining their semantics and sematic enrichment due to the development of the associative field both objectively represented in the text in the lexical meaning of the verbal elements and the chain of reactions that emerge in the recipient’s consciousness in the process of poetic text reception, its understanding and interpretation;

– comprehensive analysis of lingual-aesthetic parameters of the literary text, penetration into the deep layers of the text, “splitting” of the literary-aesthetic matter of the text with the aim of “extracting” the ideas, values and knowledge implemented in it. In this respect it is important to take into consideration that the conceptual representations in the texture of the literary work encompass both explicit and implicit forms. The implicitness of concept verbal representations, descriptiveness, high contextual dependence of the language sign sense, ludic, symbolic character of the expression is a leading feature of the poetic discourse. In this case the identification of the concept results from the interrelation of multilayer textual constituents – the hinting words, signal-words, “congestion” of images, emotions and impressions, emerging in the result of holistic perception of the text.

Complex process of poetic, imagery sense of the poetic word meaning originated from the ability of the poetic contexts units to enrich their semantics in the result of interaction with other elements, to produce additional associative manifestations which are the ways expressing definite conceptual meanings and secure the transference of the imagery structures into the conceptual ones – the phenomenon defined as surface / quick and deep/postponed conceptualization (Tsur). Herewith, it is worth considering the thesis about a special character of the representation of the world in fiction, creativity of cognitive processes, the phenomenon of the so called cognitive “unconscious” as a dominating in the literary semantics those forms of conceptualization which are not easily accessible for direct observation but are extricated in the process of “deep reading” (Vorobyova 379–380) and reconstruction of multidimensional semantic-cognitive structure of the literary text.

Literary conceptualization of national space: literary poetic concepts

NATIVE LAND and MOTHERLAND. Let us demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested theoretical principles of cognitive stylistic approach on the analysis of national space literary poetic conceptualization in the poetry of famous English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

Poetic text as a type of the art enjoys its own rules of matter organization that lies in the connection of its elements into a single unity. The meaning of each separate element seems to dissolve in its environment giving birth to new, unexpected senses. The volume of the poetic text sense increases both on account of associative-imagery connection of the word and the effect of poetic formula (Maslova 171) specific for any time and any nation providing the fusion of national spirit and poetic sense.

Calm is the fragrant air, and loth to lose

Day's grateful warmth, tho' moist with falling dews,

Look for the stars, you'll say that there are none;

Look up a second time, and, one by one,

You mark them twinkling out with silvery light,

And wonder how they could elude the sight!

The birds, of late so noisy in their bowers,

Warbled a while with faint and fainter powers,

But now are silent as the dim-seen flowers:

Nor does the village Church-clock's iron tone

The time's and season's influence disown;

Nine beats distinctly to each other bound

In drowsy sequence – how unlike the sound

That, in rough winter, oft inflicts a fear

On fireside listeners, doubting what they hear!

The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun,

Had closed his door before the day was done,

And now with thankful heart to bed doth creep,

And joins his little children in their sleep.

The bat, lured forth where trees the lane o'ershade,

Flits and reflits along the close arcade;

The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth

With burring note, which Industry and Sloth

Might both be pleased with, for it suits them both.

A stream is heard – I see it not, but know

By its soft music whence the waters flow:

Wheels and the tread of hoofs are heard no more;

One boat there was, but it will touch the shore

With the next dipping of its slackened oar;

Faint sound, that, for the gayest of the gay,

Might give to serious thought a moment's sway,

As a last token of man's toilsome day (Calm is the fragrant air, and loth to lose).

The cited verse is saturated by sensor, acoustic and visual images of the completion of a summer day (man'stoilsome day), as a full round of clock arrows (the village Church-clock) – a cycle between work (Industry) and rest (Sloth), intended to represent a model of microcosm pivoting around the axis between the terrestrial and the celestial “shaped” by the vertical line of the church bell tower. Above there is the Sky studded by stars which twinkling is scarcely discernible because of the thick wet fragrant air. Below there is the Land – bedewed, covered by flowers. The space is cozy limited outside and above by the crowns of trees along the narrow path, by bowers formed by bushes and flowers(trees the lane o'ershade, along the close arcade in their bowers). The motion in this evening space is practically imperceptible, unnoticeable, it can be just sensed by scarcely heard sounds (Faint sound): The bat, lured forth; Flits and reflits; A stream is heard – I see it not, but know / By its soft music whence the waters flow; The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth / With burring note; Wheels and the tread of hoofs are heard no more; the next dipping of its slackened oar. And when the birds songs came down (The birds, of late… / Warbled a while with faint and fainter powers), this space is evenly filled with nine clear and calm strikes of the church clock. In this space-microcosm the human life is programmed by the laws of the Nature, determined by the motion of the celestial bodies (The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun, / Had closed his door before the day was done), by the change of seasons. And even the toll of the bell sounds differently in winter and in summer, evoking different emotions (how unlike the sound / That, in rough winter, oft inflicts a fear / On fireside listeners, doubting what they hear!).

In Wordsworth’s poetry there is a strong connection between concrete, single and everyday facts in their function, on the one hand, to foster the comprehension a hidden essence of life, the perception of single life manifestation as an important aspect in the general scheme of the existence (thus, it is worth attention the introduction into the imagery texture of the verse such seemingly unpoetic creature as bat, goatsucker, moth); on the other hand – to depict really important experience of ethnic mentality. The poet creates the model of miniature, as if disjoined land on the surface of which the ray of poetic generalization seizes punctate detached one from the other, self-sufficient stable values – the English peasant, his home and the closest natural environment. The space is poetically conceptualized as a physical and spiritual pillar of human existence, thus, its role in the depiction of ethnic, psychological, social and historical parameters of the national existence is of great importance in the authors poetic picture of the world.

Spatial concept-images play a leading sense creating role in the literary work and are defined by the diversity of the ways of their imagery representation. The imagery organization of the space in Wordsworth’s poetic works turns to the reader by its different facets. The poetic space is related to the real geographical space that is verbalized by specific toponyms ('Mid the green mountains; these steep and lofty cliffs; In the sweet shire of Cardigan, / Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall; "Kilve," …"was a pleasant place, / And so is Liswyn farm; From the Great Gavel, down by Leeza's banks, /And down the Enna, far as Egremont"), it is experienced and interpreted by a human being, by a protagonist, by a lyrical hero, by the author as native and strange (To join those miserable men he flew; / And now to the sea-coast, with numbers more, we drew; Some mighty gulf of separation past, / I seemed transported to another world), close and remote (distant town), hostile (the streets of want and pain; Helpless as sailor cast on desert rock; Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, / At houses, men, and common light, amazed); favourable, existing here and now and imaginative, fantastic belonging to the past, the dream, the memories (the sweet thoughts of home; Foregone the home delight of constant truth, / And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth; My thoughts on former pleasures ran; / I thought of Kilve's delightful shore), real (home, village, field) and mystical (grave, lake, wood), corresponds to the spiritual and physical state of the protagonist (There is a blessing in the air, / Which seems a sense of joy to yield / To the bare trees, and mountains bare, / And grass in the green field); Love, now a universal birth, / From heart to heart is stealing, / From earth to man, from man to earth), serves as a background of the depicted events (the dreary mountain-top; on English ground, / And in the broad highway), related to the notions of motion and transference (And she came far from over-the main; to the woods away! With quickening pace my horse drew nigh / Those paths so clear to me).

The positive perception of the space is construed as limitedness, freedom, the sense of calmness and happiness manifested by the accumulation of lexicon saturated by emotional and expressive connotations within the micro context (for example, open space – freedom, happiness): Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll'd: / With thoughtless joyI stretch'd along the shore (The Female Vagrant). Native space stretches up and down, it is open and let the human being to feel safe and protected: The fields better suited the ease of his soul; Among thy mountains did I feel / The joyof my desire (I travelled among unknown men); His soul was knit to this his native soil (Brothers). Native, inhabited land is filled with the objects of love observing which a human experiences joy and pleasure. Natural objects and the elements of the landscape are personified, endowed by the ability to positively influence the subject, native land is the object of love and the environment of the spiritual improvement: “Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale / Where he was bornand bred”, – writes Wordsworth about his hero in the poem There was a Boy, and he himself expresses his love to his native land:

1) I travelled among unknown men,

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor, England! did I know till then

What love I bore to thee (I travelled among unknown men).

2) visible for many a mile,

The cottage-windows through the twilight blazed,

I heeded not the summons: happy time

It was indeed for all of us; for me

It was a time of rapture! (Influence Of Natural Objects In Calling Forth And Strengthening The Imagination In Boyhood And Early Youth)

3) Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear

4) well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being (Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour July 13, 1798)

Aesthetic assimilation of the space occurs through the prism of perception and activity of the main Wordsworth’s character – a peasant-farmer, a peasant-shepherd, herewith, it is worth attention that there is a domination of the idea of individual rather than collective mastering and transformation of the space. A lonely female reaper works in the field singing, and the sounds of her song fill up the space of the valley as an activity fills up the space of the life: Alone she cuts and binds the grain, / And sings a melancholy strain; / О listen! for the Vale profound/Is overflowing with the sound (A Solitary Reaper). The house of the shepherd Michael stands high in the mountains, far from the inhabited space: …from the public way you turn your steps / Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll; No habitation can be seen; but they / Who journey thither find themselves alone / With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites / That overhead are sailing in the sky… / Their cottage on a plot of rising ground / Stood single, with large prospect, north and south, / High into Easedale, up to Dunmail-Raise, / And westward to the village near the lake; (Michael). The space of his life is understandable and subjected to him only, it defines the essence of his individual activity. The sounds that fill the space is a special music understandable by him only: Hence had he learned the meaning of all winds, / Of blasts of every tone; and, oftentimes, / When others heeded not, He heard the South / Make subterraneous music, like the noise / Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills (Michael).

The space is not only the natural environment but an essence of the human being existence. Maximal authenticity in the depiction of the space, detailed description of everyday ethnic aspect of the space to which a large textual matter aim to intensify the pragmatic influence of the text over the recipient, to secure his / her emotional “immersion” into the reality.

In the poetic picture of the world, created by Wordsworth, characters act and exist outside the collectively mastered space. Irrespective of the notion that gets into the focus of poetic depiction (either a lonely tree securing shelter for a tired wanderer, or a destiny of family or single person) – Wordsworth’s poetic space is the limited location in the unlimited space of the nature. The loneliness, remoteness, solitude of the object of poetic depiction and the subject of experience is a dominating feature of the literary structure of most Wordsworth’s poetic works which (the structure) we understand as a set or system of corelations between content, expressive and depicting elements of the unity that in its functional, communicative and axiological value, in its intellectual and sensual flows is directed to the stylistic system, of a certain author or literary trend. Wordsworth strictly adhered to the principle of depicting a human being through the common natural manifestations, through the idea of harmonious coexistence of a human being and natural environment, a human being as a center that absorbs all natural impressions and the nature vibrating in concord with the inner state of the experiencing subject in the result of which the outer and inner “landscapes” become symbolic correlates.

Wordsworth’s hero is lonely both physically and socially, hencewith, the “loneliness” and “remoteness as a feature of real and poetic space is marked by axiological ambivalence. On the one hand, loneliness and remoteness is a correlate poverty and old age (poems Goody Blake and Simon Lee); on the other – the salvation from the invading of “social” space both in the sphere of intimate feelings (the poem Thorn) and into the destiny of protagonists, avoiding of intrusion of the “new times advancing”, civilizational changes (Ruth, The Ruined Cottage, Female Vagrant, etc.) which in their textual projection is manifested in gravitating towards specific temporal-local images characterized by the general common semantic feature “calmness”, “tranquility”, “stagnation” (At evening, when the earliest stars began / To move along the edges of the hills, / Rising or setting, would he stand alone, / Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; In November days, / When vapours rolling down the valleys made / A lonely scene more lonesome;), cyclicity on motion (around a circle, up and down): She wandered up and down; / And many a hill did Lucy climb; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills; among woods / At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights, / When, by the margin of the trembling lake, / Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went / In solitude, such intercourse was mine (Influence Of Natural Objects In Calling Forth And Strengthening The Imagination In Boyhood And Early Youth).

Wordsworth’s poetic discourse is saturated by micro images of stone covered in moss (hill of moss, mossy stones, verdant hills),lonely tree on the hill (This lonely yew-tree stands / Far from all human dwelling; the bare trees, and mountains bare), cliff which top is a cozy place to watch the distance (that tall rock / That eastward looks):

© The Editorial Council and Editorial Board of Linguistic Studies Linguistic Studies

Volume 39, 2020, pp. 83-97

Literary Conceptualization from Cognitive Stylistic Perspective (Based on William Wordsworth’s Poetry)

Romanyshyn Nataliia

Article first published online: June 01, 2020