Metaphor power and language typology: Analysis of correlation on the material of the United Nations Declarations

Abstract

The established approaches to language typology share the notion that the features used as a starting point for any classification are linguistic rather than discursive. This study aims to reveal the connection between typological characteristics of languages and linguacultural patterns of expressing metaphoric meaning in discourse. We seek to answer the question: is there a correlation between the way the human mind processes metaphors, and typological characteristics of languages in which those metaphors are verbalised? The research material includes the texts of the United Nations Millennium Declaration and A Universal Declaration on a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World in three languages – Russian, English and Chinese. The methodological framework is based on the quantitative analysis of indicators connected with language typology (synthesis, agglutination and isolation) and metaphor power in discourse. To determine the degree of text metaphorisation, we employed the Metaphor-driven discourse analysis (MDDA) based on the calculation of metaphor indices: Metaphor Density Index (MDI), Metaphor Intensity Index (MII), and Metaphor Functional Typology Index (MfTI). The study further juxtaposed the typology indices and metaphorisation indices to identify the correlation between the typology index values and metaphor power on the example of the UN Declarations in three languages. Research results indicate that isolating analytical languages tend to be more figurative than synthetic ones, which is reflected in higher metaphoric density, intensity of metaphor use and frequent employment of structural metaphors. The example of the Chinese language has demonstrated that its typological characteristics on the levels of graphics, word formation and syntactic structures act as prerequisites for metaphor use. The findings contribute to the understanding of the connection between fundamental frameworks of thinking, typological characteristics of languages and linguacultural patterns of expressing identical or similar meanings in discourse.

Keywords

• language typology
• metaphor power
• metaphoric density
• metaphoric intensity
• metaphoric function
• speech impact