Military metaphors in the Discourse of the Presidents of Russia and France in the beginning of XXI century

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of military metaphors which are relevant to the modern Russian and French political (specifically presidential) discourse. In modern linguistics there are two main approaches to studying metaphors: semantic (where metaphor is regarded as a linguistic phenomenon) and cognitive, where it is interpreted as a certain way of constructing the reality. The methodological basis of our research is the theory of metaphorical modeling, which is a synthesis of structural, semantic and cognitive approaches. This article represents a comparative analysis of military metaphors (which are archetypal for political communication) used in the speeches of four presidents of Russia and France of the early 21st century – D. A. Medvedev, N. Sarkozy, V. V. Putin and F. Hollande, and based on the corpora of texts that are examples of political discourse monologues (inaugural, congratulatory, welcoming speeches, etc.). In this study, military metaphors are nominations in which there are signs of military action in the form of opposition to an «enemy» and the use of weapons. The analysis took into account substantive and verbal structural metaphors realizing the conceptual model «Russian / French reality – the ongoing war»; the study also considered extralinguistic factors that influenced the creation of political texts. Text selection took into consideration the degree of importance and relevance of the domestic and foreign policy issues covered in them. The analysis showed that the frequency of military metaphors usage is not identical not only in the speech of different politicians, but also in the discourse of different societies, and demonstrated individual and national specificity of the military metaphors functioning in the political leaders discourse, which was directly related to the topical “agenda” for a country. Thus, it turned out that the French presidents resort to «militant» (in metaphorical terms) discourse more than the two Russian heads of state; the greatest frequency of military metaphors is demonstrated in F. Hollande’s speeches.

Keywords

military metaphors, political discourse, metaphorical modeling, frame, slot