Language representation of the literary subconcept “childhood” in Charles Dickens’s books

Abstract

The article highlights the peculiarities of understanding the categories “literary concept” and “literary text” at the modern stage of language science development. The authors clarify the choice of the approach towards the analysis of literary concepts - from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, present a brief description of factors that influence the inner world of characters of Dickens’s books -the reflection of the social policy of England of that time. Employing a “semantico-cognitive” approach towards language analysis, the authors explain the main characteristics of the approach, define “cognitive interpretation” as a unique component of the “semantico-cognitive” method, which makes the analysis different from other approaches towards language study and gives an opportunity to achieve the most reliable results. The authors also describe peculiarities of implementing the “semantico-cognitive” approach, list additional methods used for working with the literary concept, mainly corpus linguistics methods: compiling of the corpus of texts, contextual analysis, compiling of concordance, qualitative analysis, descriptive method. The practical part begins with the description of results received via the semantic analysis of the subconcept “childhood”. During the analysis, a variety of semes has been identified; their hierarchy and percentage ratio are described. Further, the variety of semes is compressed into several cognitive characterisics by means of cognitive interpretation. The cognitive characteristics are the following: kindness, happiness, basis for life, blemish, unhappiness, game and study. The cognitive characteristics are organized in the form of fields of the subconcet “childhood”, where the most frequently verbalized, or pre-nuclear, one is “kindness”, and it is, presumably, the most important one for the author. All other characteristics are described in descending order, where “game and study” is the least frequently verbalized characteristic, it is of a backgound nature and is used for describing children’s routine. The graphic model describing the results of the research and its decoding are presented. The conceptual analysis is followed by examples from Charles Dickens’s books. The examples describe the cases of verbalization of different cognitive characteristics of the subconcept “childhood” that are parts of the context of the books Oliver Twist, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, A Walk in a Workhouse. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article.