Analysis of cognitive metaphors presented in the political discourse corpus of the US presidential election campaign 2012.

Abstract

This article from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and political linguistics explores new ways of interpreting cognitive metaphors. Research material is political discourse of US presidential campaign 2012. Cognitive metaphors are found by methods of computational linguistics in the material collected by the author to the corpus of political discourse of national publications such as ‘The New York Times’ (corpus called TNYT) and ‘USA Today’ (corpus name is USAT), as well as in the case of pre-election presidential debates of candidates for the US presidency Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Gathered corpora TNYT and USAT have been processed by a computer program AntConc. The obtained results of the study of political discourse analysis of corpus permit to explain the need for change in the approach to the analysis of political discourse and the effectiveness of innovative techniques of computer processing of written discourse to identify new linguistic phenomena and socio-cultural spheres of American society.