The emotional potential of the lexeme "heart" in the artistic discourse of Bohdan Lepky

The article analyzes the expressive potential of the lexeme heart as a representative of human emotions and feelings in the artistic discourse of Bohdan Lepkyі. Based on the material of the writer’s historical prose, it was found that his language creation is characterized by the wide use of the somatism heart to objectify the psycho-emotional state of the characters. In the author’s texts, there are descriptions of the actions and movements of the heart as human reactions to emotional stimuli with the help of predicates of beating, blows, rhythmic and non-rhythmic movements, compression, disintegration, in combination with which the human heart is associated with the hidden feelings and emotions of the characters. The human heart in the works of Bohdan Lepkyі is endowed with the ability to speak or remain silent, contemplate and listen, prophesy and predict, etc. Linguistic markers of such signs of the heart are metaphors that convey various situations of excitement and emotional experience. The writer widely uses emotional phraseology with the heart component, in which the phraseologisation of emotions and feelings is achieved through personification and metaphorical reinterpretation of the heart as the emotional basis of a person. In the author’s descriptions, the verb type of metaphor prevails, since verbs most dynamically convey a person’s psychological state or reaction to emotional stimuli. Along with common language phraseology, the write’s works contain individual and authorial stable verbal expressions that reveal the specifics of depicting the image of the heart. The somatism heart in the language of B. Lepkyі’s works is also defined by metaphorical epithets that explain adjectives and record the writer’s ideas about human moral and ethical values, characterizing the characters as bearers of certain traits and personal qualities. In the works of the writer, the lexeme heart has a symbolic meaning, it is associated with various feelings, blood and other substances, fire and heat, the linguistic expression of which is conveyed by various metaphors and phraseological units.