THE LINGUISTIC NATURE OF SYMBOL (BASED ON THE LANGUAGE OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 20 <sup>th</sup> CENTURY)
The article is devoted to the analysis of different points of view on the category of symbol and the methods of linguistic description of symbol in imaginative literature. The article analyses different viewpoints on the category of symbol and shows different ways of its linguistic description in a literary text. We find the following research works on philosophical nature of the symbol the most significant: “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” by E. Cassirer, A.N. Whitehead’s theory of the symbol, C.G. Jung’s symbolic or depth psychology, M. Heidegger and P. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols, S. Langer’s metaphoric symbolism. Symbols can be an object of a special linguistic analysis. Moreover, there are words in literary texts the symbolic nature of which require revealing. Such symbolic potential is usually characteristic of sacred words. Their semantics reflects spiritual worldview of a particular religion. Sacred words in free and idiomatic usages can verbalise symbols. We believe that the best way is to use the componential analysis to find sacred semes in the semantic structure of the word along with the method of semantic reconstruction. As an example we study the lexeme of “rose” in works by Thomas Stearns Eliot and Iris Murdoch. The symbol there is verbalised by a certain lexeme. In Thomas Harris’s novel “The Silence of the Lambs” the symbol of “butterfly” is not only verbalised by the symbol-lexeme, but also by the words which make it more specific.