Military conceptual metaphor in Russian and Chinese political discourses

Abstract

The author argues that conceptual metaphor is an important part of the national language
picture of the world, which reflects the mentality and way of perceiving the world of the people.
Against the background of colossal differences on the formal-structural, semantic and cognitive
levels of Chinese and Russian languages, many concepts, due to the commonality of human
experience, have some similar characteristics. The paper analyses the conceptual metaphor of
“war” using the example of political speeches of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese
President Xi Jinping during the epidemic period. The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in
late 2019, was a global problem that required diff erent countries to join forces, an experience that
became part of our common history. In the 18 texts of Putin’s speeches and 7 texts of Xi Jinping,
given in 2020, when the first attempts to counter the rapidly developing epidemic were made,
“war” appears as the source sphere and “fighting the pandemic” as the target sphere. That is, the
pandemic was juxtaposed with the enemy and the efforts made to combat it were equated with
war, forming 9 varieties of frames, including “military action”, “war space”, “war actors”, “means and strategies”, etc. The study revealed common and distinctive
features of the war metaphor in the two languages, the common
features refl ecting the common mentality of our peoples, our similar
stimuli, but the different course of events and the difference of goals
set by the heads of the two countries, the war metaphor is expressed
in their speech in different frames. Consequently, the characteristics
of the conceptual metaphor depend on the preconditions of the
speeches, the pragmatic aims of the speaker, and have distinctly
expressed linguistic and cultural features. 

Keywords:

conceptual metaphor war, political discourse, ; text of speech, epidemic period