All-Russian academic journal
“Issues of Cognitive Linguistics”
Author: Ruslan D. Kerimov
Affiliation: Kemerovo State University
Abstract:
The paper examines the issues of studying German political metaphors in a cognitive aspect. The author focuses on the function of metaphors in structuring the linguistic worldview, when a metaphor emerges at the interface of two conceptual domains, and is based on certain features they are thought to implicitly share. In social communications, metaphors can be based on meanings of words that are fixed in the usage, in dictionaries, and in proverbs and sayings; on the other hand, metaphors can be based on creative occasional imagery which arises from the context of political speeches and the language of the media. In the latter case, however, occasional metaphors are quite often built upon the usage meanings, whose scope is invigorated, expanded and augmented. German political conceptual metaphors describe the social and economic aspects of Germany's politics and society. Political metaphors mirror the ste-reotypes and ideas pertaining to the German political culture and to the German-speaking ethnic community as a whole. The author uses the method of cognitive framing to reconstruct the structure of the conceptual sources of political metaphors at different levels of linguistic abstraction. The paper demonstrates how the method of cognitive framing is used to reconstruct the conceptual structure of the source domain "WAR" and describes the lexical and semantic aspects of metaphorization of military vocabulary in the German political language.
Keywords: political discourse, linguistic worldview, concept, conceptual metaphor, the German language
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Pages: 57-66