Pragmatic Aspect of Metaphor in the Modern Korean Political Discourse

Present work is devoted to the pragmatic aspect of a metaphor in the modern Korean political discourse. Metaphor is recognized to be not only a language category, but a tool to think and to describe some abstract concepts and phenomena. Metaphors create a framework of our thinking process and reflect our culture, history and world view. This study is intended to analyze main theories on the concept of cognitive metaphors and their use in the political discourse as a whole. Also in this work we are going to describe the types of metaphors which are typical for the Korean political discourse. To achieve this goal we will analyze some speeches by the President of the Republic of Korea Park Geun Hye to determine the features and pragmatic functions of metaphor in the process of communication between a politician and common people and intentions a politician have while using a metaphor. Speaking about the methods we used in this work, there are empirical, descriptive methods, classification, content analysis among them. In this work we found out that the main function of a metaphor in the political discourse is a pragmatic one, as it’s purpose is to change people’s world view. Main pragmatic intentions of the speeches of Park Geun Hye are to give information, to make people cooperate and to make the analysis of the political situation.