METAPHORICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF WAR IN AMERICAN MEDIA DISCOURSE (BASED ON ARTICLES ON RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the metaphorical conceptualization of war in the American media discourse. Conceptual metaphor is an important unit in the field of cognitive linguistics because it provides insight into how people perceive the world through their utterances. For more than a year, world publications have been paying a lot of attention to the Russian-Ukrainian war, and therefore it is necessary to analyze how this war is covered in the mass media. Articles devoted to the problem of the Russian-Ukrainian war in such popular American online publications as “The Washington Post”, “The New York Times”, and “The USA Today” were chosen as the research material. The theory of conceptual metaphor (J. Lakoff, M. Johnson) became the methodological base for practical analysis. Among the research methods, the following were used the method of conceptual analysis, component analysis and the method of various simulations (when the models were developed in the form of conceptual metaphors, where one concept was revealed through a certain feature of another). The article systematizes the theoretical researches on conceptual metaphors based on the works of famous foreign and Ukrainian researchers. Findings show that the most numerous conceptual metaphor of Russian-Ukrainian war is structural one, which is represented by the following metaphors: WAR IS CRIME, WAR IS DAMAGE, WAR IS ECONOMY, WAR IS A LIE, WAR IS HUNGER, WAR IS A GAME, WAR IS THEATER, WAR IS A DISEASE, WAR IS A ROAD and WAR IS COMMUNICATION. There were also singled out such metaphors as ontological metaphor WAR IS A CONTAINER, which indicates the limitations of war, and the orientation metaphor UKRAINE IS UP AND RUSSIA IS DOWN, which shows that Ukraine is higher than Russia on the spatial axis.