Polycode Representation of Kinesthetic Phrasemes: Metaphorical and Semiotic Perspectives

Abstract

The study is devoted to the analysis of somatic metaphor in the political communication, considered as a syncteric metaphorical-semiotic structure, which serves as one of the ways to encode ideological, cultural, evaluative, emotional, argumentative and other types of meanings. The necessity for a detailed analysis of the implementation of the actional code in the media political space was dictated by the need to study the mechanisms of interaction between kinesthetic and linguistic signs as powerful means of persuasion and effective impact on the readership. The study is based on an integral semiotic approach which involves the use of semantic-cognitive analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, methods of contextual interpretation and conceptual metaphorical modeling, as well as the involvement of interdisciplinary information of the fields of cultural studies, sociology, psychology of communication and political science. The material of the study is represented by electronic mass media analytical and news reports on the political subjects with the focus on verbal and non-verbal somatisms. It was found that the system of archaic ideas and ritual actions determines the metaphorization and symbolization of related and free phraseological formations, the origin of which is due to the markedness of the elements of the non-verbal body code. Intercultural analogy and pragmatic parallelism of non-verbal and verbal representations of somatic units along with semiotic interpretation of the original meaning is revealed. Differences in communicative pragmatics and axiology of somatisms identical in structure and content in the intercultural aspect are characterized. Techniques for constructing the external and internal syntax of the actional code are described, models for assembling kinesthetic phrasemes into gestalt are demonstrated, and algorithms for unpacking/decoding of their meaning are demonstrated. The synergy of verbal and actional languages of communication in the construction of a cognitive-linguistic picture of the political world is noted.