LINGUOCOGNITIVE MECHANISMS OF CONSTRUING KEY CONCEPTS OF EKPHRASTIC GENERALIZATIONS IN MODERN ESSAYS ABOUT FINE ART IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The article explores linguocognitive mechanisms of construing key concepts of ekphrastic generalizations in modern essays about fine art written in English. The material of the study is the essays about Giorgio Morandi by Robert Hughes and Siri Hustvedt. Studied within the linguocognitive and linguopetic perspectives, ekphrasis in essays about fine art is treated in this paper as a linguistically represented cognitive entity involved in generating new meanings through the interaction of the visual and the verbal. Ekphrastic generalizations in the two analysed essays comprise ten key concepts and conceptual clusters: ART, PAINTER, PICTURE, STILL LIFE, OBJECT DEPICTED IN THE PICTURE, FORM OF THE OBJECT DEPICTED IN THE PICTURE, RELATIONS BETWEEN THE OBJECTS DEPICTED IN THE PICTURE, ARCHITECTURAL OBJECT, SEEING, LIMITNESS. The meanings of these concepts are construed in the essays through eleven linguocognitive mechanisms: overviewing historical development, actualizing philosophical or artistic conceptions, comparing and discovering the similarity, comparing and discovering a difference, description, narration about a painter, narration about a spectator, quoting an art critic, employing an abstract concept, reinterpreting a concept, applying a concept from another aesthetic system. The overall meanings generated in both essays are similar to each other and can be reconstructed as two interrelated statements “a limited range of the objects depicted in the pictures does not mean a limited number of ideas represented by these pictures” and “Morandi’s art is important as it teaches how to see objects without haste”. The results of the study reveal that ekphrastic generalizations in essays about fine art are complex by their nature since they appear due to the interaction of several different linguocognitive mechanisms. Besides, the study provides one more evidence of the creative nature of language with its demonstration that even though different authors employ the same linguocognitive mechanisms in developing their arguments, they opt for different combinations of these mechanisms. The results of the study make it possible to claim that the specific feature of ekphrasis is its twofold nature: ekphrasis is a means of learning about artworks as objects in the real world and a means of learning about worldviews embodied in these artworks.