Textual Microfields WINTER and MAN in Short Stories by Soviet Writer Yuri Shamshurin

Abstract

The research addresses to the anthropocentric aspect of a literary text and mental representations of the Arctics in the author's image of the world. The relevance of this study is defined by the demand for humanitarian knowledge and culture of the inhabitants of the Arctic regions in connection with the technological development of the Arctics. The goal of this article is to design a model of textual associative semantic micro-fields WINTER and MAN in the Arctic discourse of Soviet-era author Yuri Shamshurin and identify the points where these micro-fields meet or cross each other. The study is focused on those lexical items which participate in building the secodary reality in Shamshurin’s short stories. The novelty of the study lies in applying congnitive-discursive approach to the study of the Arctic fictional discourse. The key methods of analysis used in this study are field analysis, lexical-and-semantic analysis, contextual analysis and cognitive interpretation method. As a result of the study, the nuclear lexical-and-thematic groups of the microfields MAN and WINTER were identified, such as CRAFT and WIND, as well as the intersection points of lexical-and-thematic groups for both microfields. The main attributes of winter identified in the mental representation of the Arctic discourse in Shamshurin’s short stories are wind and cold, being the phenomena which a man encounters first and foremost during his daily activities. The northern lights, which have no intersections with the microfield MAN but represent a unique natural phenomenon, are also one of the main attributes. In addition, it has been revealed that when lexical-and-thematic groups intersect their boundaries become mobile, which can lead to the creation of a new lexical-and-thematic subgroup within the microfield. An issue has been revealed that is connected with defining the lexical-andthematic groups containing lexical items that perform an artistic function in a particular story, such as a plot-forming or symbolic function. In this case, they are not representative of their group in a given microfield.