VERBALIZATION OF THE CONCEPT “WAR” IN MODERN BRITISH MEDIA TEXTS

Under the influence of linguistic and cultural characteristics, mental representations may vary. Associations that native speakers of a particular language have are directly related to their linguistic world picture. The concept “War” finds a multiple and variational manifestation in the English language, expressed in the semantics of units of different levels in the form of a universal attribute of war. In the linguistic and cultural respect, the most valuable are the metaphorical word usage, the interpretation of which allows to detect similarities and differences in the reflection of the world in the minds of people speaking different languages. The composition of universal metaphorical models operating in newspaper texts is quite homogeneous. At the frame structure level, the greatest features are revealed due to the specifics of the national language and national consciousness. The models that most clearly reflect the cultural traditions and national mentality of native speakers are “war is the work of a complex mechanism / train movement”, “war is the theater / cinema”, “war is the game of chess / gambling”. There are also zoomorphic metaphors for the conceptual vectors of cruelty and aggressiveness belonging to the model “war is the animal world”. Nowadays in connection with the current armed conflicts, the English language is undergoing another stage of development and enrichment in new words.