Specificity of scientific political metaphor (a case study of A.J. Gregor's scientific article "The Roots of Revolutionary Ideology")
Previous research into conceptual metaphor in political discourse was done on media texts. The present paper deals with a political scientific text "The Roots of Revolutionary Ideology" by the outstanding American politologist A.J. Gregor. Recent years have seen the growing interest to per-sonological knowledge represented by conceptual metaphors in personotexts from different discourses. Based on the premise that personological knowledge is manifested in original metaphors, this research aims to reconstruct Gregor's original metaphorical models at different stages of cognition. The study was carried out in four steps using the method of functional-stylistic analysis, the Pragglejaz method, Gurin and Belikova's algorithm for metaphor classification and, finally, G. Steen's methodology. First, the analysed political scientific text was broken into subtexts (problem stating, hypothetical, substantiating and deducing) correlating with different stages of cognition. Second, there were metaphors found in each of the subtexts using the Pragglejaz method for metaphor identification. Metaphors are different in terms of personological knowledge representation. Thus, they were divided into conventional and original applying Gurin and Belikova's algorithm. In the research original metaphors included both individual mapping of the source and target domains and individual filling of slots in case of conventionalised cross-domain mapping. Only original metaphors were further analysed using G. Steen's five-step methodology: finding a metaphorical focus, proposition, comparison, analogy and mapping. As a result original metaphorical models were reconstructed for each subtext: REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS A HUMAN BEING, REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS AN ANIMAL, and REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS INANIMATE NATURE in the problem stating-hypothetical subtext; REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS A HUMAN BEING, REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS AN ARTEFACT and REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION in the substantiating subtext; REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION (MATHEMATICS) in the deducing subtext. The reconstructed models allowed concluding about Gregor's per-sonological knowledge manifested in his metaphorical ideas at different stages of cognition. Thus, the problem is that revolutions are human, but revolutionary ideology is inhuman. Gregor hypothesises and proves that revolutionary ideology was created by humans artificially (an artefact) using exact calculation (mathematics) and it is relative to time and circumstances. Content analysis showed that 50% of Gregor's original metaphors are SOCIOUMORPHOUS with a half of them referring to the MATHEMATICS conceptual domain. ANTHROPOMORPHOUS AND ARTEFACTUAL original metaphors have equal numbers - 20% in each group, while NATUREMORPHOUS original metaphors are the least -10%. So, it may be concluded that Gregor opposes socio-political life and nature regarding revolutionary ideology as an artificial product of human activity.
Keywords
персонологическое знание, научная метафора, политический дискурс, субтекст научного текста, модель метафоры, personological knowledge, conceptual metaphor, political scientific text, subtext, metaphorical modelAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Morozova Irina S. | Higher School of Economics | ismorozo@rambler.ru |
Smolianina Elena A. | Higher School of Economics | elen3002@yandex.ru |
References

Specificity of scientific political metaphor (a case study of A.J. Gregor's scientific article "The Roots of Revolutionary Ideology") | Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya – Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2017. № 50. DOI: 10.17223/19986645/50/6