Chinese Political Media Discourse: The “Flow of Water” Conceptual Metaphor in the Verbalization of Russia-China Cooperation
Introduction. The article explores the actualization of the “flow of water” metaphor in the media discourse on Russian-Chinese cooperation. The aim of this work is to identify the cognitive and cultural mechanisms of using this metaphor in the official publications and speeches of the Embassy of China in the Russian Federation. The relevance of the study is determined by the peculiarities of metaphorical modeling in political and diplomatic media discourse for understanding the specifics of cooperation between Russia and China. Methodology and sources. The methodologies employed include cognitive-discursive analysis, metaphorical modeling, linguistic-cultural analysis, and corpus analysis. The empirical base consists of texts from the official website of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the Russian Federation for the period from 2019 to 2024. Results and discussion. The analysis identified seven key characteristics of the “flow of water” metaphor: presence of a source and continuity, rapidity, variability, uncontrollability, accumulative property, life-sustaining properties and directionality. This categorization revealed the specific ways in which the “flow of water” metaphor functions in conceptualizing Russia-China cooperation within media discourse. Conclusion. The study confirms the hypothesis that the “flow of water” metaphor plays a pivotal role in constructing the image of Russia-China cooperation and highlights the linguacultural specifics of this metaphor's conceptualization in Chinese media content. The findings contribute to research on political metaphor and cross-cultural communication.
Authors: Xiuqing Chen, Vera V. Boguslavskaya
Direction: Linguistics
Keywords: the “flow of water” metaphor, political media discourse, thematic group, metaphorization, cognitive-discursive analysis, cooperation between Russia and China, linguocultural analysis
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