ONOMASTIC METAPHORS AS MEANS OF REFLECTING THE ECONOMIC REALITY

Abstract: The article deals with the phenomenon of onomastic metaphor serving as a means of reflecting the economic reality from the point of cognitive linguistics and anthropocentric paradigm. It analyses the way people realize socio-economic changes through onomastic metaphors. The main sources of onomastic metaphors in the economic lexicon that come from different spheres of knowledge are studied. Specific cultural and universal features of onomastic metaphors are emphasized. ______________________________ Recent changes in social, economic and political life in our country and in the world on the whole brought considerable changes into the language, with the help of which we perceive and cognize the reality. Trying to explain the changes of the world many economists, experts, analytics, journalists and other public men use different figurative means that describe all happening in the world in a bright, laconic and comprehensible manner. One of such means is metaphor, the aim of which is to brighten up information, to involve the recipient into the topic and to influence him by gaining his trust and sympathy. Since the ancient times and up to now metaphor has been the subject of different investigations: from understanding metaphor as one of the ways of decorating the speech (Aristotle and other ancient philosophers) to realizing it as a means of cognition of the reality (N.D. Arutyunova, A.N. Baranov, A.P. Chudinov, S.S. Gusev, R. Jackendoff, M. Johnson, I.M. Kobozeva, E.S. Kubryakova, G. Lakoff, A. Musolff, J. Zinken, etc.). According to G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, "metaphor is persuasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature" [Lakoff, Johnson, 1980: 3]. Today the mainstream in linguistics belongs to the cognitive approach and anthropocentrism through which metaphor is viewed. According to the cognitive point of view metaphor is not only a way of nomination and elocution, but one of the basic means of the world conceptualization, as people's knowledge of the reality is always fixed in metaphors. Due to anthropocentrism the main role in analyzing the language belongs to the man, because everything is viewed through the human's mind. Metaphor as a part of the language system possesses the properties of anthropocentrism, i.e. drawing analogies between the objects existing in the real world and the objects in the human's mind, his associations. Onomastic metaphors as the subject of our investigation, in our opinion