National and cultural characteristics of political metaphors

Metaphor possesses important characteristics and plays a significant role in shaping of the linguistic world view. It is an object of research for many disciplines – from philosophy and literary criticism to cultural linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Metaphor is studied as an important way to manifest cultural identity of a language community and to accumulate its knowledge about all aspects of life, in particular about social and political relations. This article deals with general metaphorization patterns relevant for most languages, and with language-specific features of metaphorization.