The socio-cultural aspect of metaphor and verbalisation of ethnic stereotypes

The article considers the metaphor as a universal mechanism in the creation of emotional-evaluative nominations and one of the ways of ethnic stereotypes verbalization existing in the English-speaking communities. Through normative signs metaphor evaluates a person, presenting his individual image. Further, some of the features of the personal image form the basis for stereotyping. Ethnic stereotyping, prejudice find their linguistic materialization and lead to the emergence of ethnic nicknames, expressed by lexical units, motivated by the appearance characteristics of representatives of any ethnic group; life-style characteristics of an ethnic group; a place of residence of an ethnic group; features of culture of an ethnic group, represented by specific peculiarities of national culture (clothing, occupation, etc.), gastronomic preferences or names of traditional dishes. Verbalized by means of figuratively-motivated lexical units, ethnic nicknames thanks to their socio-cultural component of the meaning reflect that part of the linguistic worldview that represents the human experience gained in the process of observation of the people around, especially for representatives of other ethnic groups.