Exploring the conceptual metaphor of “War” in political discourse: a case study of the 2021 presidential address to the Federal Assembly
This paper analyzes the peculiarities of the conceptual metaphor of “war” in the 2021 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation (hereinafter referred to as “Presidential Address”) in order to reveal the typical cases of the metaphoric usage in this Address and in the Russian political discourse in general. The aim of the study is to discover the way in which President Putin uses the conceptual metaphor of "war" in the Presidential Address to express his ideas in the sphere of national government and international relations and determines the strategies in domestic and foreign affairs. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and drawing on the classification, statistical and analytical discourse analysis methods, the authors extracted a sample of 30 metaphorical lexical units which are used in the Presidential Address 83 times in total and analyzed the metaphorical units that represent the source domain “WAR”. The analysis shows that the Presidential Address employs such metaphorical models with the source domain “WAR” as “Fighting epidemic is a war”; “Country development is a war” (including such sub-metaphors as “Poverty alleviation is a war”, “Demographic problem is a war ”and “Environmental protection is a war”); “Politics is a war”. The model “Fighting epidemic is a war” is the most frequently used one. President Putin employs the conceptual metaphor of “War” to explain the governance concept in some target domains in order to describe complex and abstract concepts such as “fight against coronavirus” and “country development”, etc., which ultimately helps the audience understand the core of these concepts and allows the politician to win people's understanding and support.