THE EXAMINATION OF CONCEPT OF «MORALITY» IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE FROM A COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The presented paper deals with the concept of morality in a political context. The aforementioned concept was examined within a cognitive linguistic framework and from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. After familiarising ourselves with the literary sources concerning the present topic, newspaper articles relating to politics and published on Transcarpathian Hungarian news portals were analysed. The aim of the analysis was to demonstrate the role of context in conceptualisation. In the course of the research, the authors were also curious about whether or not the concept of morality is understood differently in our everyday lives and when talking about politics, and which related concepts appear when talking about morality in a political context. In order to give answer to questions, fifteen newspaper articles on political topics were put under investigation. The articles involved ideas such as criticising and blaming the Ukrainian society and Hungarian minorities as well as power and social relations. In the course of the research, passages of the articles regarding concepts of morality were identified. As a second step, metaphorical linguistic expressions were systematized and compared with previous research findings to shed light on the relationship between conceptualization and context. The theoretical background of the research was mainly based on the works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, ‪Zoltan Kovecses, Albert Widdowson. In order to identify which linguistic expressions were metonymic and/or metaphorical, the Metaphor Identification Procedure VU was followed, which is an improved method of the metaphor identification procedure developed by the Pragglejaz group (2007). The results of the study confirmed Lakoff's (2002) theory that people’s conceptions of morality are related to patterns of political thinking. In addition, the views of cognitive pragmatics that moving from context to language, its influence on our conceptualisation can be demonstrated were also supported.