摘要
The paper offers a three-dimensional linguosemiotic study of similes, which implies integral analysis of their semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects. Such an approach to the study of similes is quite new as they have been hitherto considered either from a literary viewpoint as one of the stylistic expressive means of language or in the philosophy of language in correlation with metaphor. The three-dimensional linguosemiotic methodology of research has enabled us： （1） to reveal the cognitive, psychological, and metaphorical essence of similes and work out the invariant conceptual model which remains unchanged throughout their structural-semantic variation in the text; （2） to single out pragmatic features of similes, the set of which defines their linguistic status as a language-in-use construct, i.e., textual phenomenon; （3） to study the denotational-cognitive aspect of similes pointing out the parameters according to which similes have been differentiated into semantic types and subtypes and （4） to generalize the syntactical aspect of similes and define the set of their structural modifications in the text conditioned both by the intralinguistic regularities and by pragmatic factors. Therefore, we have worked out an interdisciplinary theory of similes implying the synergy of the data of linguistic, literary, cognitive, and psychological studies
