Formation of the Iraq Image in the German Regional Media through Conceptual Metaphors

Abstract

The article presents the results of the study of productive conceptual metaphors regularly used to create an image of Iraq in the German regional media. Metaphors are characterized with regard to their frequency, the amount of lexical means in metaphorical nominative fields, and the characteristics added to the formed country image. The sources of the material are the regional media Berliner Zeitung, Aachener-Zeitung, Saarbrücker Zeitung, Münchner Merkur, Berliner Morgenpost, Tagesspiegel. The sample includes publications from 2019 to the present. Contextual and definitional analysis and quantitative calculations are used. The following metaphors are identified as the most frequently used (in descending order of productivity): "Iraq is a living being", "Iraq is a non-whole whole", "Iraq is a place of uncontrolled power", "Iraq is a warrior". The listed metaphors are updated in the publications of the German regional media by the lexical units of the semantic fields "speech activity", "mental state", "physical state", "movement", "division", "mental manifestations", "weather manifestations", "war". The highest nominative density distinguishes the personifying metaphor "Iraq is a living being"; the lowest nominative density characterizes the metaphor "Iraq is a warrior". The metaphors "Iraq is a place of uncontrolled power" and "Iraq is a non-whole whole" reveal a similar degree of linguistic detail of the corresponding conceptual metaphorical spaces, an average degree of variability in the designations of the introduced semantic shades. The lexical units leiden, Teil, toben, kämpfen are attributed to the most frequent kernel means which implement the studied metaphors. The kernel of the Iraq image in the regional German media is constituted by such features of the country as suffering, divided, raging, struggling.