DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL METAPHORS IN THE BRITISH CORPUS: FROM VICTORY BELLS TO RUSSIA’S V-DAY

The framework for the present research is diachronic political metaphor studies that deal with the historical development and historiographical potential of political metaphors. The relevance of diachronic analysis of political metaphors in British political discourse (1945-2000) is determined by both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The paper analyzes the evolution of conceptual images associated with World War II. The study utilizes the principle of uniform fragmentation with a 5-year fragmentation step (9 May 1945; 9 May 1950; 9 May 1955 ... 9 May, 2000) interconnected with the principle of focus fragmentation. A digitized sample from the British Newspaper Archive corpus is investigated through corpus analysis, cognitive and discourse analysis and metaphorical modeling. The statistical outcomes demonstrate that the frequency of references to “Russia’s V-Day” in the issues dated by 9 May in each fragmentation step correlates with the general decrease of interest in Russia. The conceptual analysis shows that the military-political discourse is mythologized and tends to present the image of the world as a black-and-white value model. The paper evaluates the pragmatic potential of the dominant metaphorical models, elicits the discursive factors that shape the usage and meanings of metaphors, demonstrates the interdependence between metaphors and the images they generate and emphasizes the role of the historical context in this process. The results of the work are of interest to a wide range of Russian and foreign specialists in cognitive linguistics, political linguistics, political science, history, sociology.