SPATIAL OPPOSITIONS IN THE POLITICAL ARENA OF GREAT BRITAIN

Abstract

This article is a part of a complex comparative study of orientation metaphors in British political discourse in the early 20th and 21st centuries. The study has been carried out on the basis of official political speeches. The article is based on discrete analysis of spatial metaphors within the periods of 1905-1920 and 2010-2020. These time periods were chosen in order to analyze two ideologically different centuries of political power in Great Britain: the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by the rule of the Liberal party, the beginning of the 21st century is associated with the rule of the Conservative party. The urgency of the article stems from the use of comparative metaphorology as an actively developing area of modern linguistics, the purpose of which is studying mental concepts of the people through the prism of language resources. The purpose of this work is to find out similarities and differences in the use of orientation metaphors by politicians of radically different conservative and liberal ideologies within one - hundred year period. Since the concepts of orientation metaphors are archetypical, because they are based on spatial orientation of people in this world, they represent a good basis for a study of human mind. Proceeding from the semantic differences of their usage in the political contexts of different periods of time, it is possible to make a conclusion about the national worldview, which, in its turn, may allow the researcher to understand how people’s way of thinking changes in the course of a century. The following methods were used to conduct a comparative study and to identify temporal transformations in this article: diachronic analysis, component analysis, linguistic description, continuous sampling, metaphorical modeling, and cognitive - discursive method. The article demonstrates the confrontation and correlation of the meanings of archetypical and variable metaphorical models and analyzes the ideological differentiation of the usage of orientation metaphors. This work might be of interest to Russian and foreign specialists in the field of political metaphorology, cognitive linguists, politology and history.