THE ORGANISM METAPHOR AS A KEY ONE IN THE FORMATION OF THE LONDON TEXT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Abstract
The article examines the organismic metaphor and its derivatives within the London text of the English language and literature (i.e. the invariant textual entity for a group of texts thematically related to the British capital). The article considers the metaphors chiefly from the semantic viewpoint, and explicates why the sememe London can be combined with predicates and attributes containing the seme Animate, which seems to be incompatible with it. Such an analysis permits actualising a non-obvious dimension of London text - structuring the city as an organism, and primarily the anthropomorphous one. The research cited in the article has been carried out at the junction of the cognitive and semiotic approaches, according to which socially significant mental entities are examined via a semantic analysis of corresponding supertexts. The article draws on the literary canon of New English, a study into which has revealed continuity in the metaphors and the means of their linguistic expression that have been used by the English-speaking community to reflect and structure reality. The article thus postulates the relative stability of London text as a supertextual entity.

Keywords: organism metaphor, London text, supertext, interpretative semantics, English literary canon.