The Key to the Future: Predictive Meanings of Political Metaphor (Based on British Texts about Russia of the Great Patriotic War Period)

The present research is performed on the lines of linguistic political prognostics. The source material is a digitized full-text commercial monolingual corpus “The British Newspaper Archive”. The statistically valid sampling was retrieved for the word forms “the USSR, Russia, future” from British publications (including those of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) issued in the specified time span (22 June 1941 - 09 May 1945). The system of metaphorical models of the retrospective period is analyzed according to the following parameters: the number of metaphorical models used to construct models of Russia's future; dominant metaphors in the chronological period under analysis; pragmatic meanings they convey; the ability of metaphors to produce “best-case” and “worst-case” images of the future. The illustrative corpus comprises 3,373 texts, with 19 metaphorical models in 1,154 contexts. The present article briefly recalls the main results of the retrospective analysis of the dominant metaphorical models used in the British discourse of the Great Patriotic War period to construct the future of Russia; the elements of the diachronic analysis include their comparison with the findings obtained from the previous research of the 19th- and 21st-century British political discourse. The author proves that portraying Russia's future as INANIMATE NATURE and PATH is archetypal for British political discourse about Russia's future, while dominant metaphors of HOME, RELATIONSHIP, and CONSTRUCTION are specific only to the Great Patriotic War period. The author shows that predictive meanings conveyed by metaphors are maintained, duplicated and accentuated by other linguistic means used to express future semantics and to formally organize the prognosticating context. The data obtained from the diachronic research verify the findings that political discourse is subjective and subject-centered, and that the use of particular metaphors modeling the future is determined by certain discursive factors and historical context of the period, but these new findings call into question the existence of the historically formed, stereotyped, and extremely negative image of Russia and her future found in British political discourse. The analysis of the new material of the Great Patriotic War period from the British Newspaper Archive, which has not been an object of any linguistic research so far, is aimed at enriching the historical memory about the Great Patriotic War and inspiring a renewed interest in the events of the period in our country and abroad.

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