Redka I. Synaesthetic Imagery in Poetic Text from the Cognitive Perspective: A Study of American Female Poetry of Late 19th – Early 21st Century.

This dissertation focuses on the study of cognitive features of synaesthetic images formation and functioning in American female poetry within the framework of cognitive and psychosemantic approaches. The dissertation classifies synaesthetic images with regard to their functioning in everyday communication or poetic speech, as well as situational and perceptive peculiarities of their formation. Verbal poetic synaesthesia as a poetic phenomenon is viewed in the thesis as a cognitive construal that manifests the author’s multifarious sensations, incorporating three levels: preconceptual (preconscious mental images which trigger synaesthetic image formation), conceptual (quantum/a information projection from one sensory concept onto another), and verbal. The main types of synaesthetic mappings that activate sensory concepts of three conceptual fields (OUTER SENSATIONS, PROPRIOCEPTIVE SENSATIONS, INNER SENSATIONS) are defined alongside with the synaesthetic tropes through which they are manifested. The research reconstructs the main models of mappings integration within verbal poetic synaesthesia. The main tendencies of the synaesthetic image use in American female poetry have been revealed with the help of quantitative analysis.