The dynamics of metaphorical models in the Russian language (Soviet and modern periods)

This article is devoted to comparative study of conceptual metaphors. They areused to characterize the socio-political and socio-economic situation in Russia. The purpose of the study is to find traces of the metaphoricalsystem of the Soviet period in the language of modern newspaper social and political journalism to trace the dynamics of metaphoricmodels. The articles from the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta (2000 and 2010) and newspaper Pravda (2007 and 2010) were studied.According to the study, metaphorical models such as the metaphor of WAR and MACHINES / MECHANISM are the most urgentin modern newspaper speech. As in Soviet times, social and professional groups of the population are called the army (army of engineers,army of teachers, army of workers, etc.), calling for vigorous activity - mobilization (financial mobilization, mobilization of domesticresources, etc.). Military metaphor reflects the core program of the party: the front of the struggle for workers rights, ideologicalwar, the army of unemployed, etc. in the newspaper Pravda (the printed organ of the Communist Party). Metaphor The state machineis a regular metaphor. Rossiyskaya Gazeta underlines the positive meaning of this metaphor such as the functionality and efficiency, forexample (state machine operated in a reasonable automatism), then, in opposition, Pravda metaphor MACHINES / MECHANISM has amore negative connotation (unwieldy government machine, falsification). In general, metaphor MACHINES / MECHANISM occursfairly often on the pages of Russian newspapers than in Pravda, which is due to its nature and pro-government political orientation. Arepresentation of the state in the form of a building / house is still traditionally used in the newspaper speech (for example: Russia as anation is constructed, built and rebuilt (as in the USSR), some parts of state policy and the economy: building democracy, freedom, anew model of economy, etc.). In modern social and political journalism, as well as in the Soviet one, the development of the country ismetaphorically compared with the movement along the way / road. Spatial metaphors of these periods differ only in the objectives of themovement, for example, if in the Soviet period the USSR was on the road of Lenin and Stalin to communism and the Soviet stateship under the leadership of great Stalin went towards the exact policy, nowadays, the country is moving by the route of V.V. Putinsupported by President Dmitry Medvedev. The study showed that in modern Russian journalistic language the basic conceptual metaphors(anthropomorphic, artefact, sociomorphic, and space ones) are preserved. The comparative analysis of the pro-government andopposition periodicals showed that the basic conceptual metaphors are much more frequent, regular and varied in the official periodicalof the Government of the Russian Federation than in the opposition press, which indicates, on the one hand, the continuity of contemporarypolitical discourse, on the other one, the stability of language models including metaphorical ones.

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