Metaphorical modelling of person in Russian dialects of Amur Region (Russian Far East)

The article deals with the metaphorical fragment of the dialect world picture. The object of our research is metaphors used in the Russian (Amurskaya Oblast) dialect speech. The author represents the metaphorical reflection of the human being's experience, realized in metaphorical units which constitute the conceptual sphere ''Person''. The author bases her ideas on the basic points of the Theory of Conceptual Metaphors, developed by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson. The metaphor is viewed as the reflection of the world picture, represented in person's mind. The structure of the metaphorical representation is a certain mechanism that explains the main principals of the verbal modelling of reality. The metaphor is viewed here as a linguo-cultural phenomenon, the methods of cognitive and structural linguistics are combined with the methods of linguo-cultural interpretation. Having analyzed the dialect metaphors (their direct and figurative meaning) we described the typical features of the dialect world picture, particularly the idea of life's uncontrollability. Metaphors reflect aspects of the conceptual scope of "person" relevant to dialect speakers. It is physical condition, health, memory, behaviour, and mental state. The analyzed dialect metaphors prove that the ideas about life in general and about certain events, about Time, and Death are constructed on concrete images, existing in the real life, the source of which is the world around. Metaphors reflect, above all, the solid, physical experience of the person. Inner world in most cases is constructed by analogy with the outside, dialect speakers use images of flora and fauna for that. The linguistic world picture, reflected in the metaphor world picture fragment, states the aspects of reality that the dialect speakers value the most, it depends on many extra linguistic factors. The reconstructed metaphorical world model with a great degree of accuracy reflects the mundane (naive) representations of a dialect speaker generation - the dwellers of Amurskaya Oblast, born in the 1920-30s.

Keywords

Authors

References