Anthropomorphic metaphorical interpretation of the conceptual sphere "vehicles" (degree of metaphoricalness of the conceptual sphere and productivity of this metaphorical model)

The given work is devoted to the study of the anthropomorphic metaphorical interpretation of the conceptual sphere "vehicles" and changes in the productivity of metaphoricalness of this sphere during the second half of the twentieth century. Two separate but correlated tasks are solved in this article: 1) determination of the productivity of the anthropomorphic metaphoricalness of the conceptual sphere "vehicles"; 2) studying the changes in the productivity of these processes over the last century. In this article, we use the term "degree of metaphoricalness of the language representation of the conceptual sphere", which is defined by the proportion of context actualizations of direct nominative meanings and metaphorical ones that represent phenomena of the relevant conceptual sphere during a particular period of time. This average proportion varies with time. The units of the analysis are predicative and non-predicative phrases, including the name of the mechanism, its characteristics and actions. We investigated the contexts of 24 Russian language lexical items naming vehicles like car, truck, bus, etc. The total number of contexts that represent the analyzed lexical items is 227,208 metaphorical and non-metaphorical phrases, 1258 of which are anthropomorphic metaphorical interpretation contexts. The frequency of lexical nominations was determined by means of The Frequency Dictionary of the Modern Russian Language (the Russian National Corpus). The frequency of anthropomorphic metaphorical contexts was determined by means of the method of direct quantitative calculations as well as in correlation with the overall frequency of their use. In the second part of our study, we tried to present the frequency and functional productivity of anthropomorphic interpretation on the example of lexical nominations indicating vehicles by taking into account their temporal changes. The analysis of the lexical nominations of vehicles in metaphorical and non-metaphorical phrases identified the key features of the anthropomorphic interpretation of the conceptual sphere "vehicles". 1. Most of the analyzed lexical items are characterized by the average frequency of their use both in non-metaphorical and metaphorical phrases. The comparison of metaphoricalness and frequency of the lexical nominations of vehicles indicates the asymmetric relationship of these concepts relating to most of the analyzed contexts. Certain lexical items are characterized by diametrically opposite exponents of frequency and degree of metaphorical productivity. 2. Diachronic analysis of lexical functioning did not show any statistically significant effect of the use of the analyzed lexical items in the aggregate of all its meanings in the artistic and journalistic discourse, but it revealed that the use of the words in metaphorical contexts is discourse specific.

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