Metaphorical modelling of social conflict in media discourse: orientational metaphors

Mapping of spatial orientation onto social phenomena helps people to structure abstract notions. Metaphors are one of the key means of representing spatial modelling in language. The research is based on the linguo-cognitive approach to studying the metaphor, the key analysis unit of which is the conceptual metaphor. The conceptual metaphor is a cognitive process of forming new notions by means of others, already cognised, a way of conceptualization of one mental domain in terms of another. The mental scheme people use to conceptualize notions of the target domain linking two conceptual domains, the source and the target ones, is called a metaphorical model. Conceptual metaphors are verbally realized in various linguistic expressions. These metaphorical expressions allow exploring the cognitive model of interpretation of reality by language speakers. The article deals with the problem of metaphorical modelling of social conflict in Russian media discourse. News and analytical texts of newspapers and news agencies telling about the conflict in Greece are analysed. The interpretative potential of conceptual orientational metaphors in shaping the image of social conflict in media discourse is studied. Metaphorical models used to model the conflict and metaphorically represented structural components of the conflict are identified and analysed. The semantic effects of metaphorical modelling are described. In the texts analyzed (34,627 words) 840 metaphorical expressions have been identified, 30.8 % of which (259 expressions) are constituted by conceptual orientational metaphors. The most common conceptual metaphors are MUCH/MANY IS LONG, LITTLE/FEW IS SHORT (35.9 %) and MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWN (25.9 %). The identified orientational metaphors are characterized by repeatability of linguistic units and objects of metaphorical modelling. The majority of the orientational metaphors described represent the conflict situation at the latent stage of the conflict developing. The orientational metaphors are also involved in the evaluative representation of things. The category of evaluation is expressed differently, depending on the model. Evaluation features are an integral part of the following metaphorical models: BETTER IS UP, WORSE IS DOWN/DEEP; INSIDE IS GOOD, OUTSIDE IS BAD; IMPORTANT IS IN THE CENTER, UNIMPORTANT IS ON THE VERGE and GOOD CONDITION IS VERTICAL. As for the models MUCH/MANY IS LONG, LITTLE/FEW IS SHORT and MORE IS UP, LESS IS DOWN, evaluation in them is realized at the level of the linguistic expression and is based on the general rule: a large quantity of something bad is negative, a large quantity of something good is positive; a small quantity of something bad is positive, a small quantity of something good is negative. In the texts analyzed, the majority of metaphorical expressions representing the conflict in Greece have a negative connotation.

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