Metaphors and construction of Vladimir Putin's authoritative discourse

<p><strong>Annotation on graduation thesis of the student Sakharova Ekaterina Yurevna </strong><strong>on the topic </strong><strong>&ldquo;Metaphors and construction of Vladimir Putin&#39;s authoritative discourse&rdquo;.</strong></p><p><strong>The Faculty of Media Communications, student group 743j</strong></p><p>This master thesis deals with the issues of construction of political discourse and the role of metaphors in the manipulation of public opinion.</p><p>The work consists of three chapters: &quot;Theoretical approaches to the study of metaphor and discourse&quot;, &quot;The features of political communication&quot; and &quot;Designing of Vladimir Putin&#39;s powerful discourse&quot;.</p><p>The theoretical part of this research is based on the works by Teun A. van Dijk &quot;News as&nbsp; Discourse&quot; and &quot;Language, Cognition and Communication&quot;, the theories of metaphor (M. Black, E. Buda, G. Lakoff, M. Johnson), the theory of frames (I. Hoffman, M. Minsky), and the works on political metaphor in Russia by A. Chudinov and A. Baranov.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As the empirical base for the study we the First Channel news as well as the texts of Annual President&#39;s Messages to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation were chosen.The texts of 5883 news and 11 Addresses were analyzed.</p><p>Key source domains of Vladimir Putin&#39;s metaphorics were selected, and the main themes of Addresses were also identified. Were defind eight source domains in Vladimir Putin&#39;s discourse. There are movement, construction, machinery, disease and health, animals, war and weapons, transparency and bureaucracy, sports.</p><p>As one of the hypotheses, it was suggested that the Vladimir Putin&#39;s powerful discourse is totalitarian. This hypothesis has not been proven. Based on the theoretical literature and the findings of the practical part of the research, we made the conclusion that the Vladimir Putin&#39;s powerful discourse is a democratic one, although it has signs of totalitarian and authoritarian ones.</p><p>As a second hypothesis, it was suggested that usage of various source domains in the Vladimir Putin&#39;s television discourse is inconstant. In 2000-2004, the metaphor with an aggressive potential (war, crime, animals) were the dominant, but then they were replaced by more soft metaphors (sports, theater). This hypothesis was proved. However, neither the one nor the other metaphors do not play a leading role in Vladimir Putin&rsquo;s news discourse. The most popular source domain is &quot;Movement&quot; (152 examples or 40% of the total number of metaphors).</p><p>This work contributes to the further development of the theory of conceptual metaphor, scientific understanding of television and political discourse, as well as the theory of speech influence through the political metaphors. The results can be used in describing the speech portraits of the politicians and compiling the teaching materials for speech dialogue in public sphere. The research may also be useful for speechwriters.</p><p>The work onsists of 123 pages. It includes 23 pages of the Appendix, 4 figures and 84 literary source.</p>