The thesis focuses on cognitive and semiotic properties of the forces of nature imagery in contemporary English poetic discourse, as well as their multimodal construal, considering, among others, ecopoetic studies. Topicality of the paper is predetermined by active academic interest to the imagery of nature, natural phenomena, in particular dangerous ones, as well as ecological problems construed in different types of literary discourse, where they possess a variety of symbolic senses.
In the light of linguistics, the imagery of the forces of nature is a product of literary reconceptualization of knowledge about the elements of nature, namely fire, water, air, and earth, as well as about a number of natural phenomena and calamities generated by them. As a consequence, writers and poets resort to creating verbal and non-verbal images of the forces of nature conveyed by a number of verbal and non-verbal means in contemporary English poetic discourse along with symbolic senses they construe.
The thesis elaborates a complex methodology to analyze the forces of nature imagery in contemporary English poetic discourse. It includes four stages, i.e.: theoretical and analytic, that of methodological landscaping, construal and taxonomic. In contemporary English poetic discourse the forces of nature imagery is an umbrella concept. As to its formal facet, it includes a number of separate images of the forces of nature. As to its meaning-making facet, it is a sense complex of a variety of poetic images, whose main foci are the images of the elements. These foci, being sense bundles, accumulate a number of images of the forces of nature including natural calamities, among which there are: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, snowstorms, tornados, avalanches, heavy rains, floods, fires, and typhoons. The images of tranquil states of nature embrace the images of "calm" nature, including, but not limited to the following: description of nature as a background for other events and / or feelings, landscape and urban images of still nature.
The imagery of natural disasters includes the images of metereological, tectonic, topological, cosmic, biological, potentially possible natural disasters, natural calamities, natural emergency situations, as well as the images of global warming and climate change.
Conceptual facet is structured by conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, and conceptual oxymora with the conceptual features of the low and high degree of abstractness. Verbal facet is a verbal manifestation of denotative and significatory features of the high degree of conceptualization and connotative features of the low degree of categorization hidden in the components
of the forces of nature images. Inference of the features of each facet takes place due to cognitive and semiotic operations of precategorazation, categorization, and acategorization. In contemporary English poetic discourse components of the non-verbal facet of the forces of nature images, as non-verbal signs, interact with verbal ones in different combinations. As a result, their construal becomes multimodal, meaning on the intersection of different modes, namely: verbal, visual, auditory, audiovisual, kinetic, tactile and olfactory. In contemporary English poetic discourse the imagery of the forces of nature forms an ecological code, whose signs (components of the forces of nature imagery) fix universal and ethnospecific knowledge on nature, its phenomena and states, links between people and nature. According to the degree of novelty the images of the forces of nature are archetypal, stereotypical, idiotypical, and kenotypical. Proceeding from conceptual and semantic criterion, they include four types, such as the images of tranquil states of nature, those of natural disasters, global warming and climate change. Formally, all images of the forces of nature are subdivided into interdiscursive, installation, digital, and digitized multimodal ones. Key words: the forces of nature imagery, images of natural disasters, images of global warming, ecological code, multimodal construal, polycode sign making.
