Metaphors with the sphere sources game and school in the discourse of politics (on the example of Valentina Matvienko’s interviews from 2017 to 2020)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to describe metaphors with the sphere sources “game” and “school” in the individual language picture of a politician’s world. The political discourse of the famous Russian politician Valentina Matvienko serves as the research material. Her political discourse is represented by nine interviews, which were given to various publications from 2017 to 2020. The article turns to the study of the language portrait of a politician in the aspect of using two types conceptual metaphors. The object of research selected is not accidental — these metaphors are frequent in Matvienko’s discourse during this period. The article presents such types of conceptual metaphors as game and school. The analysis conducted illustrated that the type of game metaphors is realized in four variants: 1) “politics is a sports game”; 2) “politics is a computer game”; 3) “Media is a card game”; 4) “education is a sports game” based on the relevant cognitive signs. Another conceptual metaphor “politics is a school” is realized by means of numerous signs: ‘task’, ‘solution’, ‘formula’, ‘plus’, ‘minus’, ‘context’, ‘topic’, etc. There are 3.5 times more school metaphors in Russian politician’s discourse than game metaphors (77.2% versus 22.8%, respectively). The traits of a mentor, a teacher who, along with students (representatives of regional authorities), goes through a political school of education is dominated in Matvienko’s speech portrait. School images are most often chosen by Matvienko to express the realities of political life.