“ANATOMY OF WAR” IN THE MODERN GERMAN AND UKRAINIAN MASS-MEDIA

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the research of the anthropomorphic representation of war in the German and Ukrainian mass-media by the means of personification and is based upon the theory of conceptual metaphor and contrastive approach. The regular conceptual metaphoric and metonymic models creating “naive anatomy” of war, its physical and psychological profile in the compared languages have been singled out. The empirical dataset includes word combinations and lexemes, contexts extracted from the articles and reports in the German and Ukrainian mass-media as well as from the Mannheim German Reference Corpus COSMAS II (DeReKo-2018-II) covering a five-year period (2014-2019). One of the most widely used anthropomorphic metaphors embracing the body part appellations is the metaphor ‘face of war’ within the main conceptual metaphor ‘war is a human being’. The metaphtonymy is also highlighted as one of the models of the semantic change paths within the personification patterns of ‘war’, including such regular patterns as ‘male / female face of war’, ‘public face of war’ etc. The causative verbs and verbs denoting physical activity reveal the nature of war as a destructive force suppressing the will of human beings and considering them as objects of its influence. To the anthropomorphic patterns within the main one ‘war is a human being’ also belong: ‘war is a parent’, ‘war is a liar’. The regular semantic metaphoric and metonymic patterns are often developed within a logical antinomy of holy war (justified by the ‘big goals’) and its real inevitably devastating consequences. Special attention is paid to the changes in gender representation of war as well as in its strategies demanding new ways of researching its role in the modern mass media. The hybrid, information wars of the last years have obviously changed the language representation of ‘war’. Unexpectedly war appears to be even attractive and repelling at the same time. The representation of war in the modern mass media often causes a certain degree of its banalisation and aestheticization. The main emphasis of the analyzed contexts lies on the evaluative character of the anthropomorphic metaphor allowing manipulation of readers’ perception.