OCCASIONAL SIMILES IN LANGUAGE GAME (BASED ON THE GERMAN TELEVISION COMEDY SERIES "STROMBERG")
The article is devoted to the use of occasional similes in the television comedy series “Stromberg”, filmed in a genre of mockumentary, simulated a look of an actual documentary and mocked an ability of media to construct the reality and present it as genuine. This pseudo-documentary genre is an organic medium for the language game and its realization within the TV-discourse allows using the entire arsenal of non-verbal means of communication in addition to verbal means. Accordingly, the perceptual effect of the language game depends on a successful connection of a verbal component with image and sound. The similes in the article are considered as a stylistic device for creating certain pragmatic effects, most comic effect. The authors emphasize that the similes are an imaginative comparison of two unlike objects belonging to two different, noncomparable in real life classes and represent a sensual-visual form of the reflection of the real world in the mind of a person. The authors describe how the language game based on the occasional similes is created and determine the dependence between the degree of similarity of the compared objects and the comic character of the created image. It is noted that in the aspect of the language game three basic elements of the simile (tenor, ground and vehicle of similes / lat. comparandum, tertіum comparatіonіs, comparatum) play an important role, because an occasional simile doesn’t compare a subject with a subject or a concept with a concept, but the concrete individual subject with the concept. Also, based on the study of practical material, it seems reasonable to replace the ground of simile in a comedy series with an expanded context. Explained and extended similes expound / decode the ground underlying the naming unit and aim at creation of a comic effect. The article gives an original classification of tenor and vehicle of occasional similes in the conceptual sphere “Everyday lives of office employees”, reflecting the thematic focus of the series. The main attention is focused on the linguistic analysis of the verbalization of the concepts: “chief”, “colleagues”, “career”, “office” and “work”. Vehicles for these subjects are represented by 15 subgroups, the most frequent of which are man, fauna, food, household items, religion and rituals. They account for more than 65 % of the examples, which allows us to draw a conclusion about their significance for the realization of the language game in the TV-discourse. The authors substantiate the idea that occasional similes in the television comedy series “Stromberg” are the result of film writers’ creativity in making vivid memorable images by using verbal and non-verbal means. The original similes reflect the individual world and features of figurative thought of the main character, the charismatic head of department Bernd Stromberg. The results of this study allow us to make an assertion that an emergence of new occasional similes is associated with a search for new non-standard similes that satisfy needs of modern, “playing with language” viewers and society as a whole. It can be assumed that certain occasional similes from series “Stromberg” will eventually become a category of potential comparative phraseological units of German.