Literature as a Source of Metaphorical Modeling in Russian Media Discourse

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyze the principles and methods of using the precedent semantics of literary onyms in the process of metaphorization of the high-profile international event Brexit in contemporary (2016–2021) Russian-language media discourse. The research material encompasses media discourse, from which fragments of online versions of Russian-language newspaper and journalistic texts of different genres and socio-political orientation have been selected. As an additional source of empirical material, the author uses the newspaper subcorpus of the national corpus of the Russian language, as well as the Russian-language subcorpus of the international databases Eastview and Aranea. In order to achieve the main goal of the research the author uses the method of continuous sampling, methods of corpus linguistics, methods of content analysis, as well as narrative and contextual analysis (of fragments of media discourse), linguocultural analysis of texts, methods of conceptual analysis and interpretation. Thanks to the use of methods of corpus linguistics, more than 400 contextual realizations of the use of precedent names in connotative metaphorical meaning (in connection with Brexit) have been collected and analyzed. The article presents only the most expressive and most common examples of metaphorization of precedent names when describing the discursive event of Brexit. On the basis of the analysis, the author concludes that the so-called universal-precedent phenomena (mainly of English but also European literature) prevail in the process of metaphorization compared to those of Russian literature, which are extremely rare. In the paper’s study, the author also focuses on the fact that precedent names in the process of metaphorization undergo desemanticization (simplification of the meaning) and become distinctive cultural stereotypes. Initial hypothesis that the intertextuality of the Russian media discourse has a pronounced literary-centric character is confirmed.