Animal metaphors in the language of German politics: a linguo-cognitive aspect

The article examines the semantic features of animal metaphors in the social discourse of Germany in the cognitive aspect. The metaphorical meanings observed in usage reflect the imagery specificity for the German language and culture, which develops in the political discourse to describe social, political and economic processes and events. Manifestations of animal metaphors are based on the names of mammals (domestic and wild), birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. The paper demonstrates how the method of cognitive framing is used to reconstruct the conceptual structure of the zoomorphic conceptual source domain at the level of frames and slots, and describes the lexical and semantic aspects of metaphorization of zoonyms in the German political language.