The Discursive Metonymy in the Imagery of American Folklore Ballads

. The article presents the effort to describe the semantics of American folklore ballads with account of the links between the images involved in the text creation. The discursive metonymy is considered to be the connecting cognitive mechanism of the ballad concepts that are objectified by the verbal images in the texts. Via the cognitive mechanism of the discursive metonymy the creative activity delivers understanding each text of the ballads as the unity of images presenting the definite creative idea. Materials and Methods. American Folklore ballads serve to be the material of the scientific analysis, as the texts represent the collective typical and recursive artistic categorizing and conceptualizing of the reality. Thus, the phenomenon of the discursive metonymy can be proved to be a typical means of the textual images organization. The theory of the conceptual metaphor and the conceptual tropes facilitate the analysis of the semantics of the ballad texts. The theory of basic concepts in general and the integrated model of the networks between the concepts lie in distinguishing the dominant models of the discursive metonymy. Results. The typical linguistic means are involved in the ballad texts to enable the correlation of the ballad images within the model of the discursive metonymy. These are the repetitions in all the levels: phonological, lexical, syntactical resulting in the formation of the concept networks via the discursive metonymy in the textual level. The anaphora and cataphora, the ellipsis, and the conjunctions of different types are progressed in the development of the textual unity via the mechanism of the discursive metonymy. Conclusions. The discursive metonymy plays the structuring and generalizing role in the system of the images in the ballad texts.