METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE BY LEXICAL MEANS (BASED ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article is devoted to metaphorical models of reflecting the vocabulary of war in Ukraine. The importance of studying political discourse in the context of the current military conflict in Ukraine has long been recognized in widely understood discourse studies, with many linguistic tricks, including metaphors. The military discourse on the invasion of Ukraine, which is part of the political discourse, contains a special narrative that includes various thematic elements in various syntactic configurations, and civilians, the focus of this current analysis, are part of this picture. The article highlights the results of a pilot study aimed at studying the metaphorical narrative of statements about the war. The article aims to shed light on the discursive construction of ordinary citizens in forum discussions. Particular attention was paid to metaphors, namely metonymy, passivity of the participants, as well as the specific maximal configuration in which the statements of citizens are presented as the ground. The article describes the political discourse and its subtype military discourse in which the metaphors of emotionality and use of ordinary Ukrainians and Poles in forums are inscribed. Military narrative is a discursive way of waging war. The comments of people discussing the war focus on general observations based on specific events in Ukraine, where ordinary citizens witness the main events and are victims of hostilities. This approach is based on the cognitive linguistic paradigm, which aims to highlight the basic cognitive processes. The emotionality of the speeches of the citizens of the two countries at the forums is united in order to identify in the political discourse, namely in its subspecies of military discourse, key metaphors that vividly describe the situation in Ukraine. The article attempts to single out a metaphor in the statements of speakers about the events taking place in Ukraine and give these statements a linguistic description and explain the motive of statements that illustrate the semantic-syntactic role of rhetoric in various forums. The presented examples define the use of the word Ukraine for different referents: as a whole nation, as civilians, as the government of Ukraine.