Жанры речи (Nov 2024)

Conceptual Image of a rival country in analytical articles in Russian and American socio-political mass media (based on destructive metaphors)

  • Balashova, Lubov Victorovna,
  • Kirillova, Kseniia Igorevna

DOI
https://doi.org/10.18500/2311-0740-2024-19-4-44-357-367
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19, no. 4
pp. 357 – 367

Abstract

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The article provides a comprehensive (semantic, cognitive, pragmatic, functional, discursive) analysis of the use of destructive existential-dynamic metaphors in analytical articles in textual socio-political media published in 2022–2024. when characterizing the rival country: in 9 Russian online-newspapers – the USA, in 9 American online-newspapers – the Russian Federation. The research material consists of 52 metaphorical units in 102 contexts extracted from 45 Russian articles and 45 metaphorical units in 88 contexts extracted from 49 American articles. The relevance of the topic is connected with the debatable key problems such as: the typology of modern mass media text genres, the content-functional and linguistic features of analytical articles, in particular, the specificity of the use of conceptual metaphors in them. The aim of the article is to identify similarities and differences in the use of the destructive metaphors in the genre of analytical articles of Russian and American mass media in the formation of a conceptual understanding of the politically opponent state (USA and Russian Federation). The analysis used modern cognitive-semantic and cognitive-discursive techniques for textual material analysis. As a result of the study, it was found that in Russian and American analytical articles the same destructive model of metaphorization with semantically similar sources of transference formation is regularly used. But specific situations reflected in metaphorical contexts, as well as the syntactic, semantic and lexical compatibility of Russian and English metaphorical units, make it possible to create an individual conceptual image of the rival country (USA and Russia) in accordance with the socio-political / ideological political worldview of the subject of speech. Thus, it can be claimed that it is the cognitive function of conceptual metaphors that becomes leading in the genre under study. 

Keywords