This article is aimed to describe linguistic metaphors and to reconstruct the conceptual metaphors which determine the origin of these linguistic metaphors in Tony Blair’s political discourse. Political discourse is an object of discourse analysis, which studies political language with special consideration of its contextual factors. Research into political discourse is an accelerating trend of modern linguistics that includes the findings of different branches of the humanities such as logic, philosophy, political psychology, sociology, etc.This study presents and examines conceptual metaphors and the identification of metaphorical expressions in Blair’s political texts. The majority of metaphorical expressions forms a particular system, which can be explained through their relations to conceptual metaphors – cognitive structures, existing in the sub-conscious, that determine the interpretation of the world and unfold through linguistic metaphorics.
The present article analyses one of the fragments of naïve psychology – conceptual WAVE metaphor related to the Lithuanian language world-view. The approach to language which is close to cognitive linguistics is taken into consideration: it is referred to cognitive theory of metaphor, that allows to describe the characteristics of abstract phenomena by employing their relation to this what is concrete and understandable and what is fixed in language world-view. On the basis of the names of internal life phenomena as well as word combinations with different forms of the word wave, collected from Contemporary Lithuanian Language Corpus, those phenomena of the domains of feelings and emotions are described, which in the Lithuanian language world-view are perceived as waving.
The article deals with conceptual metaphors tied to the source domain SEA in Lithuanian political and economic discourse. The study is based on the dictionary compiled during the research project “Conceptual Metaphors in Public Discourse”, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. The analysis refers to the traditional conceptual metaphor theory, theoretical problems relevant to metaphor analysis in discourse are considered. Features of the source domain SEA conceptualize the political and economic instability and insecurity. Although political and economic discourses are rather different, the analysis of metaphorical expressions related to the source domain SEA reveals that their linguistic, conceptual and communicative properties are basically compliant.