Specific functioning of military metaphors in cinematographic text (a study of Eldar Ryazanov’s films)

The paper examines the functioning of military metaphors as one of the leading types of conceptual metaphors in the texts of Eldar Ryazanov’s films. In contemporary linguistics, there is an increasing focus on the study of cognitive metaphors, which serve as a crucial tool for interpreting creolized texts, particularly cinematographic texts. However, there has been no research specifically exploring the manifestation of military metaphors in films. This article represents the first attempt to identify and analyze metaphorical models that structure thematic groups of military vocabulary, including the following: “naming military actions and ways of warfare”, “naming outcomes of military actions”, “naming individuals directly and indirectly involved in military actions”, “naming types of weapons and their components”, and “naming military groups and units”. The study reveals the lexico-semantic, categorical-grammatical, functional, stylistic, and linguocultural characteristics of these metaphorical models in film language. It highlights the national and cultural uniqueness of the metaphorical understanding of the vocabulary associated with the semantic domain of “war”, thereby reflecting a fragment of the Russian linguistic worldview through identifying key instances of using military metaphors in everyday contexts. The findings can be applied to the teaching of Russian as a foreign language and can inform the development of textbooks on metaphorology and the linguistics of cinematographic texts.