Authors

Jurga Cibulskienė¹; Inesa Šeškauskienė¹; Virginija Masiulionytė¹;  ¹ Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, Lithuania

Discussion

The paper sets out to examine the entertainment metaphor and its scenarios realised in the media discourse surrounding a forced landing of the plane in Minsk, Belarus in May 2021, and the ensuing migrant crisis on the Belarusian border with the EU. In addition, the paper examines the metaphor’s evaluative potential in such discourse. The data for the present investigation was collected from English, German, Lithuanian, and Russian media texts, with each sub-corpus amounting to slightly over 30,000 words. The methodological framework is a blend of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies, embracing the viewpoint (Verhagen, 2007; Sweetser, 2012), Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2005), metaphorical scenarios (Musolff, 2016), framing (Hart, 2014), and some principles of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Nacey et al., 2019). The results demonstrate that the metaphor is mostly favoured in the Russian discourse. Of all entertainment scenarios, that of performance is given preference in all datasets: English, Lithuanian, German, and Russian. The evaluation attached to the scenarios in the majority of cases is negative; in some cases it is mixed. However, the viewpoint adopted in the English, Lithuanian, and German discourses is very different from the Russian discourse. The former is based on the Western values and targets the authoritarian regime, whereas the latter is Russian-centric, with the Western world posited as a major threat to the Belarusian and Russian societies. When the West promotes democratic values, such as fair election, and declares support for the opposition of Belarus, Russia uses foul language to denounce it. Mixing the domains of entertainment with mental health, stressing the deceitful and thus unreliable nature of entertainment, degrading people and ridiculing the West as being mentally unstable, Russia indirectly scorns Western values by rejecting the very idea of civil society.

References

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