The peculiarities of metonymic use of the acronym “ISIS” in American political discourse

The article investigates the peculiarities of metonymic use of the proper name “ISIS” in American political discourse. The corpus under analysis is represented by the official speeches of American politicians that describe the US military campaign in the Middle East in 2017 and 2018 targeted at fighting the international terrorist organization “ISIS” (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). The article makes it evident that in American political discourse the proper name “ISIS” has a distinguished metonymic character. The paper identifies and studies different metonymic meanings of the acronym “ISIS” and describes the lexical and grammatical means participating in their formation. The paper also investigates how extralinguistic factors such as sociocultural knowledge and images condition the emergence of particular metonymic meanings of the proper name “ISIS”.