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The paper addresses metaphor as a cognitive-semantic device which is able to reveal intuitive mechanisms of the thinking process, thus filling the gaps in the sphere of logically objective human knowledge and opening the possibility to describe abstract concepts of the human mind in terms. This paper substantiates the principal possibility of conceptual modeling of the metaphorization process and describes its baseline algorithm, identifies complex metaphors and establishes the cognitive-semantic features of their functioning. The main conclusion of the reasoning confirms the hypothesis that different image schemes have different strength of heuristic potential, which determines the fullness of metaphorical descriptions of concepts.

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Introduction. This article is devoted to the linguocultural study of humorous texts/metaphors which appeared in German during the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the previously unexplored study of the linguocultural specificity of German-language humour in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The relevance of the research is due to the interest of modern linguistics in the study of national specificity of humour.Methodology and sources. The research is conducted within the framework of the linguocultural approach using descriptive, comparative and interpretative analysis methods. The illustrative material is described and interpreted as a product of an individual's speech self-expression, marking and evaluating himself and what is happening within the boundaries of his (ethno)culture.Results and discussion. The main thematic dominant theme in the COVID-19 pandemic discourse is “us and them in the context of the new reality”. The study showed: the pandemic discourse is characterised by expressiveness and axiology, irony and self-irony, stereotyping and interpretation of self and self through the prism of others. Pandemic / self-isolation → stress → carnivalisation of consciousness represent the average German as a person who overcomes reality and evaluates it on the basis of ethno-cultural ideas about norms and patterns of behaviour in certain circumstances (the concept Ordnung). Some contexts illustrate an ironic reinterpretation of the concept of Sicherheit.Conclusion. The representation of reality is constructed on the basis of mentality and national stereotypes; within German culture, the contexts reveal a cultural distinction and, on the level of ethno-cultural comparison, a contradiction of cultural codes.

This article focuses on the analysis of metaphorical representations of the coronavirus pandemic in texts selected by continuous sampling from German-language media. The methodological basis of the research is the theory of conceptual metaphor, as well as the Russian theory of metaphorical modeling, which allow us to single out universal metaphorical models that are in line with the Zeitgeist and are part of the national picture of the world. Pandemic discourse was selected as the research space. It is understood as a media supertext or as a collection of media texts united by one topic and aimed at reflecting events associated with the pandemic. Further, the article examines predictable metaphorical models – the military model with an extensive system of slots representing most of the elements of “military” actions aimed at combating the virus; the disaster model (tsunami, storm, fire) showing the attitude to the virus as to a dangerous and uncontrollable phenomenon; the ambivalent road model (the road from the pandemic, on the one hand, and the road along which the virus is walking around the world, on the other); the legal model focusing attention on the protest part of the discourse; the zoomorphic model; the theatrical-game model. The author shows an example of the interaction of units of different metaphorical models for the implication of certain nuances of meaning. The conceptual metaphors that fill the slots of these models show the complex moral and psychological state of society and an ambiguous social attitude towards the pandemic reality. The final part of the article describes living metaphors, born as a response to the anxiety of the situation and fear, realizing unconventional meanings, to some extent a carnival attitude to what is happening, speaking ironically and/or describing everything in a plain, upfront way. A striking linguistic fact in this category of metaphors is serial metaphors, which form large word families and, by one feature, characterize a number of objects or phenomena of the new reality. Attention is drawn to complex metaphors, the semantics of which is made up of a pun on the direct meanings of the components. The conclusion states the high degree of emotional impact of metaphors, the dynamism of the metaphorical picture of the pandemic reality, its dependence on many objective and individual factors, as well as on ideological reasons. The prospect of the research is seen in the description of anthropomorphic metaphorical images of pandemic discourse of the corona-humoristic texts.