Zoomorphic Metaphors as a Means of Dehumanization the Image of the Belarusian Police in the Russian Media

Abstract

This paper studies the role of zoomorphic metaphors in the dehumanization of the image of the Belarusian militia in the Russian media. Dehumanization is considered a cognitive operation aimed at partial or complete denial of human features in the conceptualization of other people. The chronological framework of the material under study covers the presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 and the postelectoral period, saturated with mass street protests. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the cognitive-discursive paradigm, which implies the study of metaphor as a cognitive operation of transferring content from the source domain to the target domain based on analogy, taking into account the extralinguistic context of communication. As the analysis showed, most of the zoomorphic metaphors used to conceptualize the Belarusian-Russian police in the Russian media bring pejorative assessments to the understanding of the Belarusian law enforcement agencies and perform the function of dehumanizing the concepts of the target domain. At the same time, the frequency of pejorative images turned out to be higher in the texts of the oppositional Russian media declaring adherence to liberal values. Since there were fewer such metaphors in the media supporting the political leadership of Russia, a natural distortion of the metaphorical image of the Belarusian police in favor of the picture of the world formed by the opposition mass media was obtained. At the same time, in the acute phase of the crisis (August 2020), most journalists wrote about the inevitability of an imminent change of the President of Belarus and the need for militiamen to go over to the side of the protesters. The policemen's refusal to perform official duties was conceptualized as a transition from the category of aliens, i.e. supporters of power, on the side of we, which meant the protesters, who were metonymically equated with the entire people of Belarus. As the fallacy of forecasts became more obvious, the number of pejorative assessments of the police increased and the aggressiveness of pragmatic meanings, realized through dehumanizing metaphors, raised in number. In the pro-government Russian media, neutral assessments of the work of the Belarusian law enforcement agencies initially dominated, and the low metaphoricity of the discourse did not undergo significant changes in the post-electoral period.