BIRTH OF A SURREAL IMAGE IN ATTRIBUTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

Introduction. The article focuses on the problems of the surreal images in the poetry of David Gascoigne – one of the leaders of surrealist movement in Great Britain.
Surrealist image remains a complex phenomenon with weird, fantastic, dream-like qualities. To create surreality, it must conform to rigid criteria of juxtaposing distant realities.
Purpose of this paper is to define the types of semantic connections between the elements in the adjective/participle-noun constructions in Gascoigne’s poetry and to analyze the linguistic mechanisms of creating a surreal image.
Methods. The research was carried out by means of the methods of structural, semantic and contextual analysis.
Results. Despite the fact that British surrealism was less automatic than the French original, the poems of David Gascoyne show the avant-garde tendency to the liberation of the language from the established norms and freeing the poems of narrative contexts. Reading surrealist poetry involves constant and systematic decoding of strange, sometimes absurd, often violent images.
The paper looks at various types of adjective-noun constructions in Gascoigne’s poetic collection created both in accordance with the system of the language and by its violation, and analyses the ways of rendering the unconscious and creating the surreality.
Conclusions. Analyses of adjective/participle-noun combinations shows the mechanisms of image creation the poet uses in his works – expressions with literal meaning in inappropriate, metaphorical, hallucinatory contexts where they acquire new semantic shades of meaning, and combinations of lexemes that belong to incompatible semantic groups. The most complicated surrealist images are born of the interlocking of several tropes or are the product of the poet’s appeal to dream-like states and his contacts with the artists. The links of meaning in these wordcombinations are hard to find, which doesn’t lead to the destruction of the image but inspires readers’ spontaneous associations.