Metaphorical representation of the mental operations of a person in the language of German youth

The article deals with the structural and semantic aspects of the substandard representation of the person's mental characteristics in the German youth slang. The study was performed on the material of the young people's forums of the German-speaking segment of the Internet, where by continuous sampling the contexts were selected in which metaphoric lexical units with various (often negative) connotations containing in their semantics nomination of human intellectual activity are explicated. The areas of identification are revealed in which the patterns of metaphoric nomination of the thinking processes are exercised. Based on the developed by T.V. Leontieva classification of identifying areas (presentative and thematic codes), the selected material was analyzed, and it was revealed that the subject, physiological and somatic, social, botanical, culinary and gastronomic codes are the most represented in the implementation of the evaluation category of mental characteristics and properties of the subject area. The anthropological, zoological, nature-meteorological, mythological, spatial, technical, geometric, color, speech codes are represented in a small number of units. In the article the structural and semantic properties of realization of the relevant subject-thematic codes, metaphorical correlation of the lexical units with the facts of extralinguistic reality representing them, were analyzed. The cases of combining the different codes in the same metaphorical unit, in particular, social and anthropological, are characterized.