IV.
Modern mass media are distinguished by the desire for individual ("branded") content. style, expressiveness, often bordering on carnival, and emancipation, sometimes turning into permissiveness. At the same time, the public consciousness is extremely quickly filled with an inexplicable trust not only in certain political leaders and parties, but even in certain political terms and metaphors, and then just as quickly loses illusions.
The main function of political speech is to change the addressee's ideas about political reality, a kind of transformation of the political world in the minds of readers and listeners. One of the most important means of such transformation is a metaphorical model, which allows you to present a complex problem as quite simple and well-known, make it more significant or, on the contrary, distract public attention from it, show one of the options for the development of events as completely impossible or, on the contrary, quite natural.
Each productive metaphorical model is capable of actualizing a certain set of conceptual vectors existing in the national consciousness. For example, the metaphors we discussed earlier with the initial conceptual areas of "Crime", "War" and "Disease" are characterized by strong conceptual vectors of aggressiveness, anxiety, disbelief and unnaturalness of the existing situation in the country. The conceptual potential of the metaphorical model "Politics is sport"considered in this article is somewhat different. Let us first turn to the main manifestations of this model.
1. "Sports".
A significant number of political metaphors are focused on team sports. These are usually well-known ones in
* See: Russian speech. 2001. N 1, 3, 4.
page 42
All types of competitions (football, basketball, tennis, hockey) in which teams headed by captains (government, presidential, gubernatorial, etc.) participate, which include not only main players, but also reserve players, and which are managed by a coach who develops the s ...
Read more