Klaipėdos universitetas

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.

On the ground of conceptual metaphor conception, metaphor is discussed as thinking strategy, which is implemented in language by metaphorical expressions. Metaphorical expressions for which target domain is criminal and crime were gathered from texts which were published in two Lithuanian news portals in the years 2001–2015. It is important to reconstruct the conceptual metaphors not only because they reflect viewpoint of society regarding certain phenomenon, but also because implemented in the texts of media influence on the public opinion, inasmuch as the metaphor is not only some linguistic form and conceptual structure, but also manifestation of communicational function.