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METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF INFLATION IN RUSSIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2017. Issue 7 (184). P. 66-70

The article shows the specifics of the functioning of economic concepts of the media, carried out by an intermediary between reality as a mass audience and as a powerful tool for influencing readers’ minds. Mass-media not only inform readers, but frequently refract, transform events and facts, allocate with their varied assessments, impose this or that vector of their perception and interpretation. One of the ways of similar transformation of validity in mediadiscourse is metaphor. The object of the research is one of the most meaningful concepts of economic area – concept «inflation», the subject – a specific character of its metaphorical representation in the Russian mediadiscourse of XXI century. As the material of mediatexts’ research (2000-2015), presented in newspaper subcorpus the National corpus of Russian Language have served. During the analysis anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, naturemorphic, military, sports, mechanistic metaphorical models were revealed and described, their role in creation of an image of inflation in consciousness of ordinary native speakers was established, the pragmatic potential of the given models was established, the assessments of inflation shaped by mass-media are revealed. The analysis has shown, that at the given economic stage inflation in Russia is estimated by national massmedia mainly negatively, confirming this metaphorical representation of this concept, as well as its contextual environment. Inflation is metaphorically characterized as a certain subject or object, impeding to normal functioning of a society. It may be a gluttonous essence, «eating» savings of citizens with extreme speed, an invincible soldier beating the poor, a sprinter who starts at high speed and carries away behind itself the prices, a dispersed mechanism which is practically not responding to levers constraining it, destructive elements. Thus, such properties of inflation as uncontrolled, destructive influence on economy, are underlined by the need for serious economic transformations to overcome inflation.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, metaphorical model, concept, media discourse, inflation