Conceptual Metaphors in American Journalistic Texts

Abstract

The article is dedicated to representation and functions of tropes in American journalistic texts, their semantic and cognitive features. The figurative language under analysis is a reflection of American politicians' language, in particular their everyday metaphors. Not only do we examine the main aspects of figurative language associated with aquatic habitat used by American politicians in public discourse, but we also rely upon an approach based on conceptual metaphor theory when we analyse and classify conceptual metaphors related to water. The object of cognitive analysis is political texts in American newspapers and magazines. The author provides a linguistic analysis of conceptual metaphors, their functions and application. Metaphors serve as indicators of functional changes in American English. Cognitive aspects of metaphors are being discussed. According to the theory of cognitive linguistics, a metaphor is an integral part of the cognitive process and an instrument that expresses and forms new notions. American politicians often use metaphors to affect the unconscious minds of the people. The research results show that the most frequently used conceptual metaphors in the analysed corpora are the linguistic realisations of metaphors from the source domain of aquatic habitat. All the metaphors of this group are classified into subgroups according to the key semantic component. A deep consideration is given to aquatic metaphors and reasons of their topicality.

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“…Foreign scholars as J. Lakoff, and M. Turner consider metaphor as a mental operation, a tool for cognition, structuring, and understanding of the environment. It worth to single out the Ukrainian researcher A. Khudoliy, whose works are a valuable source in the field of metaphor studies (Khudoliy, 2005).…”

Semantic Classification of Metaphors in Ukrainian and English Inscriptions on Clothing

“…Contemporary linguistic research mostly focuses on metaphors in mass media (Liu, 2018;Khudoliy, 2018) or political discourse (Georgieva, 2015;Bilyk & Pyliachyk, 2018). Several modern scholars investigate metaphors in a certain thematic area: economic metaphors (Shenker-Osorio, 2012;Pamies & Ramos Ruiz, 2017), environment metaphors (Ahmadi & Ghazali, 2018;Volmert et al 2013), metaphors and emotions (Kövecses, 2003(Kövecses, , 2012Ogarkova & Soriano, 2018), immigration metaphors (Cisneros, 2008;Montagut & Moragas-Fernández, 2020).…”

Types of Conceptual Metaphor in American Political Speeches: Cognitive and Discursive Approaches

“…Foreign scholars as J. Lakoff, and M. Turner consider metaphor as a mental operation, a tool for cognition, structuring, and understanding of the environment. It worth to single out the Ukrainian researcher A. Khudoliy, whose works are a valuable source in the field of metaphor studies (Khudoliy, 2005).…”

“…The metaphorical-conceptual space of modern American journalism covers many concepts, to which we refer: spatiotemporal (sea and land), zoo-vegetative, anthropomorphic, gastronomic, and others. The whole complex conglomerate of conceptual metaphors is unified at the semantic level since it describes the same object -the world of social and political life from the point of view of a person (Khudoliy, 2005). According to A. Khudoliy, in our research we single out the following groups of conceptual metaphors in the speeches of American politicians:…”