PRAGMATIC ASPECT OF METAPHORS USED IN MASS MEDIA

The article is devoted to pragmatic analysis of mass media metaphors which nowadays became a frequent means of information transfer in the political, economical and social world. Illustrative material is acquired by continuous sampling from Internet versions of most popular Russian, English and French print media both of informational and advertising nature which allowed the authors to identify the common, conditioned by globalization problems, and national-cultural vision of the processes occurring in the modern socio-cultural and economical space. The authors also referred to the Russian National Newspaper Corpus. Data content analysis served as the basic research method. It is shown that public speeches of politicians, economists, analytics, managers of different levels and contextual advertising posted in network discourse and aimed at a wide audience most clearly represent metaphor's manipulative function which presupposes imposing views, formation of necessary attitude towards a certain event or phenomenon. The usage of metaphors is associated with a certain world model existing in the consciousness of representatives of a certain political trend, and spheres of human activity are represented through the perspectives determined by conceptual metaphors. Metaphor determines the style and way of perceiving the object and subject of political, economical and social life, forms the axiological potential of the produced information. Pragmatic analysis of mass media metaphors indicates that axiological characteristics of metaphor's content fluctuate, the value orientation changes depending on what feature forming the basis of meaning transfer is actualized at the moment