Symbolic significance of religiously marked allusions in the literary text

The article imparts the information on religiously marked allusions, their symbolic aspects in English literary texts and analysis from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics. A religiously marked allusion is defined as a direct or indirect reference to a well-known person, object or event mentioned in the Holy Scriptures. An allusion bears a large amount of conceptually significant information and it is considered to be a multifunctional unit, performing a number of stylistic, pragmatic, cognitive, socio-cultural functions. Among its other aspects, the research places particular emphasis on symbolic functions outperformed by religiously marked allusions, which entails the representation of religiously marked allusions as symbols when used in a literary text. In order to reveal the symbolic significance generated in the semantic layer of religiously marked allusions, the methods of conceptual analysis and conceptual blending were applied in the analysis of the short story “The Gift of the Magi” by O’Henry. The method of conceptual analysis is aimed to reveal symbolic meaning, functional and conceptual significance of religiously marked allusions, and to explicate the author's individual world picture and conceptual information encoded by him/her in the literary text.
The method of conceptual integration is targeted at interpreting the new information created in the recipient text on the basis of old information presented in the precedent text. To successfully apply the selected research methods, first, factual, sub-textual and conceptual information of the story was exposed. The results of the analysis show that religiously marked allusions activate religious knowledge structures, implicitly symbolize abstract phenomena, convey conceptual meaning and express the author's individual world picture.