Meteorological metaphors of “atmospheric electrical and sound phenomena” in the English and Kazakh languages

Abstract

Relevance of research stems from the lack of knowledge of pecularities of the meteorological metaphor in the English and Kazakh languages as well as from the present-day trends of the linguistics development on the basis of the modern achievements of philological science and philological research approaches, general tendency of the modern scientific paradigm and its interest in language issues, culture and cognition. It’s common knowledge that metaphorization is one of the essential ways of understanding, comprehension and categorization of reality and its further representation in the language and in the minds of native speakers of a particular language. In the context of globalization striving to standardize and make cultures vanish, this objective solves an issue of preserving the national identity that is in full embodied in linguistic metaphors, metaphoricity of language – “historical memory, spirit of the nation”. In the research work we classify various metaphoric images being part of terms, figurative meanings, idioms, the so-called meteo-phraseological units or lexico-phraseological metaphoric units relating to the meteorological thematic group of words as a meteorological metaphor in a very broad sense. The following methods of research were used with a view to accomplishing the thesis objectives: structuralsemantic analysis, continuous sampling method, word definitions analysis method with the use of the component analysis elements, descriptive method and interpretation method, comparative method. Meteorological metaphor in two languages has phraseo-forming characteristics: meteorological metaphors in the form of prepositional structures prevail in the English corpora while meteorological metaphors in the Kazakh language have a word-forming nature. Verbal, substantival and adjectival metaphorical structures in the English and Kazakh languages showed both similar and different metaphorical values, which confirms the universal nature of perception of the meteorological phenomena having no equivalents or insufficiently meeting the English language requirements. Such meteorological phenomena have specific metaphorical values unified with positive, negative and neutral connotative contents. Key words: metaphor, meteorology, national identity, structure, semantics