Metaphorical nominations of national leaders of the past as a phenomenon of actual political communication

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the metaphorical nomination of the subject as an instrument of deep-datified mediatization of a political incident of a special nature - the death/departure from active politics of a political leader on a national scale. The theoretical basis is the theory of deep mediatization, the cognitive theory of metaphor and the sociology of memory. The authors prove that the analysis of the metaphorical nominations of outstanding statesmen who left this world makes it possible to identify the public's attitude to the current state of political problematization and the structural profile of current political conflicts. Media texts and user-generated content in foreign English-language media were selected as empirical material for analysis. The resulting dataset is analyzed on the basis of the theory of metaphor in political discourse. The article shows that the death/departure from active politics of a political leader of the distant or relatively close past acts as a significant information event that generates the actualization of the political discursive field in a datatized online environment. English-language online media or online versions of traditional media were selected by the monitoring method in the system Semanticforce.ai : Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Reuters for the period 08.30.2022 ‒ 09.10.2022. A total of 12320 texts were taken into account. By means of lexical and semantic analysis, the nominations were selected from the texts and their classification into lexical and thematic groups was carried out. As a result of the study, it is shown that the death/departure from active politics of a political leader of the distant or relatively close past acts as a significant information event that generates the actualization of the political discursive field in a datatized online environment. - English-speaking online media assess the personality of Mikhail Gorbachev in a generally positive way: one of a kind, democrat, peacemaker, etc. - The thematic group of lexemes with the meaning of paradoxicity and inconsistency in English-speaking media is one of the most representative in the analyzed media discourse. - The paradoxical nature of personality assessment is linked to the counter-predictive assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev's activities during his presidency in European and Russian politics.