The Media Concept Oil Today: The Formation of the Petroleum Metaphor

The article proves the hypothesis that, in the discursive evolution of the media concept, the fact of the origin and consolidation of its ability to act not only as a recipient, the target of metaphorical projection, but also as a donor, a source that acquires the “right” to metaphorical expansion due to the growth of its semantic-interpretive resources, is especially important. For this purpose, the cognitive-semantic structure of the concept, as a result of its quantitative and qualitative discursive dynamics, should clearly identify, generali/e, consolidate and cate-gori/e the semantic features that are becoming generally accepted, typified and stable at this moment. These semantic features in their specific dispositive-structural correlation become a procedural basis for the implementation of the concept in the cognitive source domain and its metaphorical expansion into various conceptual domains. The author's analysis of the Russian-language media narrative of the past decade has marked a new stage in the discursive evolution of one of the media dominants of our time-the media concept oil. This concept actively evolves from a metaphorically unilateral target domain into a bilateral one, also becoming a source sphere, developing its metaphorical expansionary potential and creating a special petroleum metaphor. A number of intradiscursive and extradiscursive factors contribute to the formation of the petroleum metaphor based on the structure lyudi/narod/naselenie/grazhdane - vtoraya/novaya neft' (people/nation/population/citizens as another/new oil). The interdiscursive factors include: (1) the conflict-generating world modeling potential of the concept (formed in its previous discursive history) based on the opposition of the vectors of the semantic and axiological development of polar value-based valence; (2) the organic integration of metaphorical innovation into the central conceptual opposition of media and political discourses: people vs. power; (3) the actualization of verbal, historical and cultural prototypes, transmitting information-interpretive impulses to the metaphorical innovation and predicting its “plot-building”; (4) the formation of a stable structure of metaphorical consequences (as a result of regular discursive implementations and various variants of interpretive “promotion”) with the resulting consolidation of this structure in the collective linguistic consciousness; (5) the linking of the metaphorical model to certain subdiscourses (to the oppositional political discourse in the author's case), which subsequently makes the metaphorical projection easily decipherable because of the public recognition of its discursive “registration”. The extradiscursive factors include current events in the political, economic and cultural life of society.

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