The Role of Emotional Concepts in the Works of Dauren Tileukhan

Abstract

The article analyses the emotional concepts in the lyrics of Dauren Tileukhan, a young representative of contemporary Kazakh poetry, from the standpoint of cognitive literary studies. Its central question is how the poet’s verse builds a world of feeling in the reader’s mind and organises empathic response. The aim of the work is to identify the concepts that recur consistently in Tileukhan’s poetry – sadness, longing, love, loneliness, hope and happiness – and to disclose their symbolic and metaphorical texture together with their cognitive-aesthetic function in the literary text. The analysis rests on the principles of cognitive poetics and concept theory and proceeds through close reading and interpretation. The study shows that these concepts cohere into a single conceptosphere that shapes the model of the author’s worldview, and that they operate as a cognitive mechanism which awakens the reader’s feeling and draws the reader into the artistic world. Particular attention is paid to the leading role of the concepts of sadness and longing, which are understood bodily and spatially through the images of the moon, night, road, fire and moth. The scholarly novelty of the work lies in the first systematic treatment of a young poet’s idiostyle in the aspect of cognitive literary studies. Its practical value lies in the possibility of using the results in the study and teaching of contemporary Kazakh poetry within the framework of cognitive poetics. In addition, the article considers the interrelation of emotional concepts as the basis for the formation of the poet’s conceptual sphere. The concepts of sadness and longing are interpreted as the semantic core of the lyrical text and are examined in connection with love, loneliness, hope and happiness. This approach makes it possible to clarify the role of emotional images in constructing the artistic world of Dauren Tileukhan’s poetry and in shaping the reader’s empathic response.

Keywords: concept, cognitive literary studies, emotion, poetry, conceptosphere, empathy, cognitive poetics.