Metaphorical Modeling of Russia's Image in the Mass Media: the Case of American Press

The article is focused on the analysis of metaphorical modeling of the Russian image in the modern U.S. media texts. The undertaken research stresses the importance of metaphorical modeling in understanding the national world picture and national stereotypes. Basic metaphorical models reveal three negative prevailing trends in representing the image of Russia and contemporary Russian political discourse such as negative image of the Russian leader; negative image of Russia; negative relations between Russia and the United States (based on the metaphor "Image of the Enemy"). The research in metaphorical modeling of Russia in mass media of the United States of America is up-to-date as it gives grounds for classifying the material within situa-tional, contextual and cultural aspects. It is also argued that some metaphorical models are common while others are culturally peculiar and totally stereotyped. The core of the research includes the texts addressed at readers from diverse academic backgrounds, methods of continuous sampling and comparative analysis were applied. The investigation of a wide range of political discourses leads to in-depth study of the national culture and world perception as it allows to identify the functions of particular metaphorical models, the identification of source domains of metaphorical expressions, the relationship between metaphor and discourse, and the priming of metaphors. Moreover, a number of approaches to and exploitations of political metaphors in modeling the image of Russia in the American mass media, including conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive approaches are discussed, explored and critiqued using corpus data. The present research also includes corpus linguistic studies of different aspects of metaphor, which investigate its linguistic and semantic properties and relate them to current theoretical views. The article demonstrates the need for naturally-occurring language data to be used in the development of metaphor theory, and shows the value of corpus data in this work. Thus, the ways of researching metaphor from different perspectives is carried out especially through corpus linguistics. Identifying metaphorical language-use is one of the challenges facing natural language processing.

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