Conceptual Metaphor «Human Being – Nature» In Literary Text: Pragmatics and Functions

The relevance of the study is determined by the anthropocentrism of the modern scientific paradigm of linguistics and the need to establish correlations of the constituents of linguistic consciousness andobjects of the external world in the structuring and functioning of the conceptual metaphor in the literary text.Conceptual metaphor is a mental topological projection of interacting areas of linguistic consciousness and thesurrounding world. The purpose of the article is to study the functional and pragmatic potential of metaphoricalmodels built on the basis of the conceptual metaphor «Human Being – Nature» in a literary text. The materialfor the study was the literary texts of the novels of I.S. Turgenev’s “Rudin”, “Fathers and Sons”, “Smoke”,“Virgin Soil”, containing representative metaphorical micro and macro contexts. The complex of researchmethods includes the method of continuous sampling, deductive-inductive method, conceptual analysis, andthe method of linguistic interpretation. The functions of metaphorical contexts, which are based on the conceptual metaphor Human - Nature, consist in the possibility of representing the inner world of characters, theirgeneral cultural potential, social status and origin; the use of metaphors in the speech of characters (externaland internal) allows us to talk about the figurative perception of the world by these heroes, about the level oftheir emotionality and linguistic creativity, since metaphors are a kind of human thinking patterns. Analysisof the implementation of the conceptual metaphor «Human Being- Nature» in a literary text allows one todiscover and describe the priority cognitive structures of the author’s linguistic consciousness and values inherent in the individual author’s picture of the world. Research prospects are in the possibility of identifyingpriority conceptual metaphors in the individual author’s picture of the world on the basis of literary texts inorder to identify and describe the dominants of linguistic consciousness and the value picture of the world ofa particular author