Marina O. Contrastive Tropes and Figures in American Poetry of Modernism: Linguistic and Cognitive Perspective

The dissertation focuses on linguistic and cognitive peculiarities of oxymoron, antithesis, irony and grotesque in American poetry of Modernism, highlighted via tracing changes in semantic and cognitive structure of the analyzed stylistic devices, as a result of the evolution of paradoxical poetic thinking from the ancient to modern times. It is proved that verbalization of paradoxical poetic thinking in contrastive stylistic devices is based upon the principles of iconicity and symbolicity which serve to distinguish the types of constraints on their formation and interpretation. Revealing the mechanisms of contrastive tropes and figures formation made it possible to find out that attributive and situational contrastive mappings constrain the creation of oxymoron and antithesis, influencing the scope of their syntactic structure, while narrative contrastive mapping removes constraints as to the scope of the stylistic devices under study and ensures unfolding irony and grotesque in a poetic text