THE COGNITIVE CATEGORY OF IMAGERY IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LITERARY DISCOURSE

The article examines imagery as a cognitive category of English-language literary discourse. Drawing on the framework of cognitive stylistics, the study argues that imagery is not merely a decorative or expressive property of literary speech but a cognitive category rooted in the mechanisms of conceptualization, categorization and interpretation of reality. The analysis proceeds on two complementary planes. First, imagery is shown to be realized through cross-level verbalization, resulting from the interaction of phonetic, lexical, word-formational, phraseological and syntactic means. Second, imagery is described as a cognitive device: it functions as a means of foregrounding conceptually significant information and participates in the construction of literary concepts and the conceptual sphere of a work on the basis of conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration. The cognitive essence of imagery is further specified through the cognitive structures (conceptual metaphor, image schemas, frames) and mechanisms (conceptual integration, focusing/defocusing, reframing) that underlie the formation of figurative means. The material comprises English prose and poetry of the 19th–20th centuries (E. A. Poe, W. Shakespeare, Ch. Dickens, F. S. Fitzgerald, J. Fowles, J. Barnes and others). The findings contribute to cognitive stylistics and cognitive poetics and refine the theory of discourse categories.