Image schemas as a way to understanding а schizophrenic world picture in narrative аnd autobiographical discourse

Abstract

The paper describes a language personality with a mental disorder (“schizophrenia”) and the way this hero thinks in two fiction novels and one autobiography of American authors. For this purpose, cognitive mechanisms of a psychopathologic language personality are presented on the basis of spatial conceptualization and its cognitive modeling. In the article the specific world picture is greatly influenced by socio-cultural environment represented by image schemas and conceptual metaphors construing the understanding of a person’s life with this disease, who perceives the self between the real external world and the inner imagined one. The outlined cases are able to point at various stages of the disease in the books. Key words: discourse of fiction, a schizophrenic language personality, image schemas, a real and imagined world, conceptual metaphor, conceptualization.