Метаморфозы «Кошки Дэн Сяопина» (на материале испаноязычной публицистики)

Abstract

The aim of the research is to identify the specifics of realization of the cognitive potential of Deng Xiaoping’s metaphorical utterance ‘No importa el color del gato, lo importante es que cace ratones’ (It does not matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice), widely used in a transformed form in the Spanish-language media discourse as a source of speech metaphors created by the authors of publications to achieve their cognitive, communicative and pragmatic goals. The work is novel in that it is the first to conduct a comprehensive study of the techniques and methods of metaphor transformation and its consequences. The research findings showed high productivity of grammatical modification techniques, the extension of the attributive component and variations of the syntactic structure of the phrase, a direct interpretation of the cognitive feature “color” as a metaphorical designation of a certain ideology; replacing the significative-denotative ratio and components of the metaphor, using a simple metaphor, role inversion, giving new metaphorical consequences for the composition of the model (“cat”, “color”, “functioning” and “the state of the model”), taking into account the contextual environment, which increases the pragmatic potential and the impact of the metaphor.