NATURAL METAPHORS FOR MODELLING THE IMAGE OF A PERSON WITH DISABILITY IN RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

There isn’t an aspect of social policy or experience that is not deeply caught up in disability issues. Disability is one of the great issues, like race, class and gender. In the studies of the contemporary social and political discourse there is a new, little known and topical direction, it is the analysis of conceptual metaphors modelling the image of a person with disability. The article deals at length with the cognitive, discursive and contextual analysis of the metaphoric model “DISABILITY IS NATURE” within the comparative aspect (based on the examples of Russian and American mass media discourse). In the analysis the natural metaphor has proved to possess a huge emotional potential for describing problems of people with disabilities. Russian Mass Media admit discriminatory ideas of ableism to such an extent that it shows little attention and misunderstanding of disability issues in Russian society in comparison with the American one.

metaphoric model, natural metaphor, disability, disability discourse