Language metaphor generating tropes

Derevskova Elena ORCID: 0000-0001-5746-4656 PhD in Philology Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Mass Communication Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University 455000, Russia, Chelyabinsk region, Magnitogorsk, Prospekt Lenina str., 26, room 206 august1667@mail.ru Dorfman Oksana ORCID: 0000-0001-8621-4189 PhD in Pedagogy Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Mass Communication Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University 455000, Russia, Chelyabinsk region, Magnitogorsk, Prospekt Lenina str., 26, room 206 mandorffoks@yandex.ru

Pozdniakova Natalia ORCID: 0000-0001-5680-6298 PhD in Philology Associate Professor; Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Mass Communication; Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University 455000, Russia, Chelyabinsk region, Magnitogorsk, Lenin Avenue, 26, room 206 nvp2018@bk.ru Other publications by this author

 The concept of metaphor has long been of interest both for scientific research ^[1-8] and for the practice of teaching philological disciplines ^[9-13].

As pedagogical experience shows, the difficulty in analyzing a metaphor is associated with several points. Firstly, the term "metaphor" itself functions both in linguistic theory as one of the types of name transfer, and in literary studies as a stylistic device, the name of one of the tropes. Secondly, metaphorical transference largely forms a tropeic system, which makes it difficult to identify different visual means.

In the article, the subject of consideration will be such tropes as metaphor, personification and comparison, the life of which in a literary text gives a metaphorical transfer of the meaning of the word. Our task is to identify the stages of analysis that a student needs to go through to identify different tropes, which are based on transfer by analogy, similarity of signs of different objects, that is, metaphorical transfer of naming (a common metaphor). The novelty of the approach to the stated problem lies in the combination of methods of component analysis of lexical meaning adopted in lexical semantics, followed by the characterization of tropes that implement the transfer of naming by similarity.

Since the article is addressed not only to teachers of higher education, but also to teachers engaged in educational programs of basic general and (or) secondary general education, the texts of V. Krapivin, a Russian writer, journalist, teacher, author of scripts, poems and works for children, are chosen as linguistic material. This choice is connected with the artistic value of V. Krapivin's texts, and with the implementation of educational tasks that must be solved in the educational process.

Naming the factors that determine the metaphorical potential of the word, M.V. Nikitin notes that the determining factor "is the nature of a strong implicational, its volume, content, structure (interdependence of signs) and the probabilistic measure of signs (strength, brightness of association of signs)" ^{[14, p. 207]}. It is the implicational signs that "first of all are involved in the process of metaphorical reinterpretation of the word and make up in various combinations the content of the differential part of the derived metaphorical meaning" ^{[14, p. 218]}. This differential part of the meaning, in our opinion, requires attention when analyzing different tropes generated by metaphorical transfer. Text analysis should always be accompanied by reference to lexicographic publications. The mutually beneficial cooperation of linguistic theory and lexicographic practice is noted by O.I. Blinova: "The scientific fruitfulness of the community of THEORY and VOCABULARY is more than obvious: both THEORY and VOCABULARY "win". Their interrelation and interaction increase the theoretical level of research due to the use of huge material that has previously undergone lexicographic processing, often polysystem" ^{[15, p. 22]}.

It seems effective to combine didactic material into three modules in the process of studying the topic.

The first module is "Language metaphor – artistic metaphor". In a metaphorical statement, you can see an abbreviated comparison. As N.D. Arutyunova notes, without a metaphor, "there would be no vocabulary of "invisible worlds" (the inner life of a person), a zone of secondary predicates, that is, predicates characterizing abstract concepts" ^{[16, p. 9]}. An example of this thesis is the context: "Fatigue hummed smoothly in every vein" – in which the lexeme "buzz" implements a metaphorical meaning characteristic of the language and marked with an explanatory dictionary ^[17]. This transfer of naming different processes by one lexeme became possible due to the similarity of their feature: "long, lingering" (about sound) – "continuous, strong" (about pain, fatigue).

Observing the context creates the potential for learners to highlight metaphorical reinterpretation. It is the context that helps to identify the metaphor in a number of tasks of the state final certification, which many students cannot cope with without preliminary preparation and elaboration of tasks of this type.

The following exercise can serve as an example of working on the context.

Read the sentence: "It felt cold – like in the cramped streets near the Citadel, when Ulan patrols are whistling and rushing by, and you are sitting in a stone gap overgrown with white flowers, and Caesar is breathing next to your cheek, and prickly balls of fear are rolling under your shirt" ("Cockcrow"). Highlight the grammatical basis of the last part. If the proposal was a simple non–proliferation - "rolling balls", what would we present? And in the case of "prickly balls", with "prickly balls under the shirt"? Which word changes the meaning of the sentence? Using the dictionary, give an interpretation of the word "fear". What do you imagine when reading? What emotions are you experiencing?

The search for answers to the questions posed is aimed at comparing the direct meaning of the lexeme "ball" given in the explanatory dictionary and the textual metaphorical meaning, at highlighting those signs that allow the student to see how an artistic metaphor is born.

The work on the figurative metaphor involves a gradual complication of tasks – from observation, commented justification of the attribution of the allocated funds to the metaphor, independent finding of the metaphor – to its construction. The following type of exercise can be directed at this.

Read the text: "Summer has struck towards us. A summer familiar to sweet melancholy with tall grass, poplar down, the sun and pure blue over low roofs" ("Dovecote on the yellow glade"). How could you say that summer has come? Will the perception of the text change if we replace the first sentence with the following: "summer has come", "the summer period has begun"? What is the meaning of the word "hit" in the text? Give a current to the metaphor. Suggest your own version of the metaphor for autumn or winter.

It is advisable to start the exercise with an analysis of the vocabulary of the lexeme "hit", which will allow the student to see how the direct meaning and the figurative correlate, which semantic components of the direct meaning are relevant for the figurative, and which are added, which ultimately makes possible the appearance of a visual means in the text.

When analyzing metaphor as a trope, one cannot but say about the pictorial metaphor, which, according to N.D. Arutyunova, is profoundly different from the verbal metaphor, since it does not go beyond its context: "The very mechanism of creating a pictorial metaphor is profoundly different from the mechanism of verbal metaphor, an indispensable condition for the action of which is belonging to different categories of two its subjects (denotations) are the main one (the one characterized by a metaphor) and the auxiliary one (the one implicated by its direct meaning). Pictorial metaphor is devoid of ambiguity" ^{[16, p.22]}.

For the presentation of this kind of metaphor, we will give an expanded text fragment: "Well, how did our baby turn out? Grandfather asked and raised the small steering wheel at arm's length. He really was like a newborn baby, this wheel that had never worked before. The beech convex spokes and rim were the same defenseless color as the arms, legs and shoulders of the child. Just wrap it up in a diaper, so that you don't catch a cold" ("Lullaby for a brother").

The word-metaphor "kid" organizes a separate text fragment that explicates the meaning associated with the designation of the steering wheel, or, as the author calls it, reinforcing the "malyshness" with the diminutive suffix -chick-: "steering wheel". Paradigmatic relations arise in the text fragment, which include both lexemes related to the naming of steering parts (spokes, rim) and lexemes thematically related to infancy (handles, legs, diaper).

The second module "Language metaphor – personification". G.D. Akhmetova identifies another kind of metaphor that is implemented in the text, these are the so-called "living" ("humanized") metaphors, when "initially inanimate objects or phenomena are endowed with human properties. Thus, a "living" metaphor both leads away from reality and gets closer to life itself" ^{[18, p. 138]}.

"Humanized" metaphors in literary studies stand out in a separate trope – personification, personification. Personification, despite the fact that it is considered as a kind of metaphor, still has its semantic features, which are obvious both when referring to the term itself (personification, personification), and when getting acquainted with its definition "the image of inanimate objects, in which they are endowed with the properties of living beings (the gift of speech, the ability to think, feel, experience, act), are likened to a living being" ^[19].

Thus, the structure of the lexical meaning of an inanimate concept should include a sema that transmits information about the signs of a living being, for example: "But Cyril knew when and how the ship was acting up" ("Lullaby for a brother"). When analyzing the lexeme "capricious", we find the semantic component of "moral", that is, "a set of mental, mental properties" ^[17]. It is this component that makes it possible to attribute such a trope to personification, separating it from the metaphor itself.

Quite often, when searching for an impersonation, students are guided to find verbs in a sentence and identify the seme of a living being in an inanimate concept. The type of task proposed below is aimed at working with contexts that allow us to analyze impersonation as a trope generated by a metaphorical type of transference.

Read the sentences. Highlight the grammatical basis in them. Pay attention to the meaning of verb forms (use an explanatory dictionary). Can these actions produce inanimate objects? Pick up the nouns that could be the producers of the named actions.

1) The summer morning reigned over the quiet streets. 2) Even the echo got bogged down in the soft stuffiness. The corridor, rounding off, led Yar to the basement. 3) The razor purred gently in the palm of his hand, and Cornelius felt a sentimental pity for parting with this machine that looked like a trusting kitten. 4) Stasik was still crawling through the dust, scratching at the baskets, and his soul was exhausted from bitterness ("Dovecote in Orekhov").

When studying impersonation, lexicographical work is important. The analysis of the lexical meanings of the polysemantic word will once again show the possibilities of the metaphorical type of naming transfer, as well as highlight the semantic component of the verbal lexeme that carries the information "property of living beings".

The third module is "Language metaphor – comparison". Scientists have no doubts about the proximity to the metaphor of figurative comparison. N.D. Arutyunova suggests comparing the sentences: This girl looks like a doll – This girl is like a doll. This girl is a real doll. And comes to the conclusion about the formal and semantic differences between figurative comparison and metaphor, which are "largely related to the difference between these two types of logical relations" ^{[16, pp. 26-27]}. In the definition of the term "comparison", which is given in the "Literary Encyclopedia of Terms and Concepts", it is noted that "comparison is metaphorical by nature ... Remove the bundle in comparison, and you get a metaphor" ^{[20, p. 1022]}. However, if analogy and similarity are implicitly presented for metaphor and personification, then in comparison the similarity of two objects is explicated: the word verbalizes the features that the object being compared possesses.

From the point of view of grammatical characteristics, the comparison is expressed, as a rule, by a noun that appears in various syntactic positions. The comparison can be presented in the predicate: "The boy was like a thin solar spike", and also serve as a literal distributor: "At last the tan became as strong as armor" ("Crane and lightning").

It is often possible to observe the syncretism of lexical semantics, which motivates the appearance of duplexes in a sentence. For example: "The muscles on the skinny boy's legs stretched under the tanned skin like rubber cords" ("Crane and lightning"). The selection of components of lexical meaning ('braided product', 'twisted threads or strands', 'kind of thin rope' – ^[17]) makes obvious the attributive comparison of "muscles – cords", as well as the circumstantial semantics of the way of action "stretched like cords".

In teaching practice, comparison is a trope built on the comparison of one concept with another and implemented most often in comparative terms using the words "as", "as if", "exactly", "like", "like", etc., the comparative degree of an adjective or adverb, a comparative subordinate.

Often, attribution to the specified syntactic constructions is not enough for students to identify the comparison, therefore, it is unlawful to limit oneself to syntactic analysis. Firstly, it is necessary to conduct a partial syntactic analysis, secondly, to find comparable concepts in the sentence, since the absence of one of the concepts may indicate that we are looking at a metaphor, not a comparison, and thirdly, to work with lexical semantics, which will help to identify the evidence of comparison. To solve this problem, we propose to perform a task of this type.

 Read the sentence: "A spark flew between us like a tiny firefly, and landed on the palm of your hand, then on the tip of your finger" ("Dovecote on the yellow glade"). Pay attention to the punctuation marks, explain it. What complicates this proposal? What does the comparative turnover refer to? Name the concepts being compared. Find the meanings of the words "sparkle" and "firefly" in the explanatory dictionary. What unites them?

There are cases when it seems difficult to unambiguously characterize a visual medium, since it combines the signs of comparison and a parcelled design: "It turns out that the calmness in it was very fragile. Like a thin glass wall. Now this wall will burst – and all the bitterness, all the resentment that has accumulated in the classroom, will burst into tears. Like water from a broken aquarium" ("Lullaby for a brother"). In this case, in our opinion, either it is necessary to note the combination of the two functions, or pay attention to the formulation of the task that needs to be solved when performing the task: the analysis of the path involves comparison, the analysis of the intonation-stylistic figure – parcellation.

There is no single point of view on such a concept, which in linguistics is designated as a metamorphosis, and in literary studies is evaluated as a kind of comparison. Thus, V.V. Vinogradov's point of view is as follows: "it is necessary to isolate from metaphors and comparisons in the proper sense the verbal creative case, which is a semantic attachment to the predicate (with its objects), a means of reviving it, revealing its figurative background" ^{[20, p. 411]}. This position of V.V. Vinogradov remains relevant [see 16, p. 29]. However, the Dictionary of Literary Terms notes that the comparison "can be expressed by: a noun in the creative case: "His beaver collar is silvered with frosty dust" (A.S. Pushkin)" ^[19]. The same practice is followed by the compilers of control and measuring materials for the school curriculum, therefore, examples such as "And a lump flew from a chair" ("A crane and lightning") are characterized as a comparison.

One of the productive types of exercises for working with these paths is a mini-case study ^[22]: students receive language material to identify metaphorical transference, theoretical information necessary for the task, it is possible to supplement the case with an algorithm for its implementation if individual educational abilities and perceived difficulties are taken into account.

Thus, when compiling materials for the study of tropes created by metaphorical transfer, it is necessary to take into account the following points:

- the idea of similarity, analogy of features of different objects is embedded in several tropes: in metaphor, personification, comparison;

- in order to form students' ability to distinguish paths in the text, a system of exercises is needed aimed at addressing the analysis of lexical meanings presented in the dictionary entry of the explanatory dictionary, highlighting semantic components that objectively show the difference between different tropes born of one type of naming transfer; it is also important to work with the context that allows analyzing the metaphorical type of transfer.

The proposed methodology for studying complex issues of lexical semantics and tropeic system will allow, during the training of both bachelor philologists / linguists / teachers of Russian language and literature, and students of general and (or) secondary general education, to develop skills and abilities that implement professional competence associated with the willingness to use systematic theoretical and practical knowledge for the formulation and solving research problems in the field of education.

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