Methods of Diachronic Analysis of Political Metaphors
This is an overview of the methodology and methods of diachronic analysis of political metaphors. The paper discusses the leading scientific schools and areas of historical metaphorology in Russian political linguistics and their interaction with the foreign experience of political metaphor research. The paper provides an analysis of different opinions of the correlation of stability and innovations in political metaphors, of the periods of “metaphoric storm” and “metaphoric calm” in political communication. The articles, studying metaphors diachronically, may be divided into several groups according the their object: 1) articles studying political discourse of a certain country during its existence or at a certain period of its history; 2) articles focused on a fragment of political reality (image, event, person) and its representation at different periods; 3) articles studying metaphoric model and its functioning in political communication at different stages; 4) articles devoted to the analysis of politician's idiostyle and evolution of the scope of political metaphors. An attempt is made to single out different methods of diachronic study of political metaphor paying attention to the peculiarities of the approaches employed by the authors: cognitive-discursive, rhetoric, semiotic, psycholinguistic, linguocultural and others. In conclusion it is noted that multi-aspect analysis of the evolution of metaphorical models (in political discourse, in certain genres, in the speech of some politicians etc.) is an important step in the development of diachronic metaphorology and it will help to reveal the peculiarities of the national world-modeling at different stages of its development.