THE COGNITIVE FACTORS FOR USING THE ENGLISH FUNCTION WORDS ‘LIKE’ AND ‘AS’ AS MARKERS OF COMPARISON IN THE SONNETS OF W. SHAKESPEARE

Abstract

The paper studies the differentiated uses of the preposition ‘like’ and the conjunction ‘as’ in their function of constituents of poetic similes. As evidenced by the suggested analysis of linguistic data from the texts of W. Shakespeare’s sonnets, the function words ‘like’ and ‘as’ are distinguished as elements of a discursively rooted opposition that is based on the contrastive construal of two cognitive operations. Whereas the preposition ‘like’ indicates that a simile construes abstract and perceptually inaccessible things in terms of perceptual characteristics, the conjunction ‘as’ evokes the cognitive categorization of particular entities and phenomena as belonging to general categories of things, events and situations.

Keywords

• function word
• comparative construction
• simile
• cognitive operation
• служебное слово
• сравнительная конструкция
• образное сравнение
• когнитивная операция