Modeling of a vocal metaphor source-domain

The paper describes modeling the source domain of a vocal metaphor. A vocal metaphor is a special type of metaphor that describes physiological actions and sensations of a singer during voice training, and is realized in vocal pedagogical discourse. The research material included the speech of four vocal teachers of Perm Institute of Culture at solo singing lessons (8 lessons of an average duration of 51 minutes). All the metaphors related to the process of singing (voice formation) in the speech of the vocal teachers were re-vealed. The total quantity of 517 units - metaphorical words and expressions - was assembled. The structure of the selected vocal metaphors was analyzed using the frame semantics method. The analysis has shown that vocal metaphors represent a structure covering a lot of semantic areas. The structure of a vocal metaphor source domain includes at least two frames - “OPERATION” and “OBJECT OF OPERATION”. These frames allow us to represent singing as certain vocal operations performed with organs and places of vocali-zation. Each frame is divided into slots whose ranking within the frame is based on their occurrence frequen-cy in vocal metaphors. The most frequent within the structure of frame-1 “OPERATION” is the slot “physi-cal impact”.Within the structure of frame-2 “OBJECT OF OPERATION”, slots “body parts” and “condi-tion” are the most significant ones. The analysis of the interaction of slots belonging to different frames with-in the source domain leads to the conclusion that the most important interaction is the one of the “physical impact” - “body parts” type. This proves that at the initial stages of vocal training the influence on a certain organ is the most significant one for ensuring the interrelated operation of the entire singing apparatus. The interaction of slots within the source domain can be interpreted as blending which results in forming new knowledge about singing. Blending occurs between certain slots of frame-1 and frame-2, while other slots cannot interact due to some restrictions of their semantic compatibility.