UN English-language discourse: pecularities and applications in describing the world order

Abstract

This research paper is set in the context of growing interest towards globalization and its effects on contemporary English-language discourse. The focus on the United Nations’ discourse can be explained by the pivotal role of this organization in identifying, shaping and spreading global trends. The underlying assumption is that conceptual, cognitive and semantic analyses of the English-language UN discourse enable deeper understanding of the western worldview, which expands into other types of discourse with a broad audience (media, educational, etc). The application of the conceptual metaphor theory has allowed to discover a conceptual-definitional level as well as image and value levels of the employed concepts in order to find out cognitive linguistic tools which construct the world order model and the view of today’s reality. The study has shown that the language behaviour can be described with the dichotomy “uniting – separating”. On the one hand, reality is represented as a “family” field of life (based on the conceptual metaphor THE WORLD IS A FAMILY) with inherent family values and obligations. On the other hand, the world is subject to explicit categorization through the conceptual opposition of FRIEND vs. FOE and the conceptual and metaphorical model of “The fairy tale of the just war”. Mechanisms of linguistic hierarchization of participants’ relations were also revealed with the help of conceptual metaphors RELATIONS AMONG STATES ARE PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS and LEADER STATE IS A NURTURANT PARENT. The results of the study may be useful for further research on contemporary English-language discourse in a cognitive-pragmatic way, with the possibility of using the identified conceptual metaphors to detect speech tactics and strategies, as well as for comparative analysis of the constructed English-language world view with language models represented by other official UN languages: Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic.