CONCEPTUALIZING AND METAPHORIZING EUROPE IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

In 2022, Ukraine has been making headlines not only as the object of Russia’s large-scale armed aggression but also as an applicant for the status of candidate for accession to the European Union. With this in mind, an analysis of political discourse, which is regarded both as a mirror of political practices and a tool for conducting them (Yavorska & Bohomolov 2010), reveals the dynamics of perceptions of Europe in contemporary Ukraine. The prerequisite of my research is the assumption that the theoretical and methodological synergy of modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies in terms of A. Partington and A. Marchi, the discourse-historic approach by R. Wodak and elements of conceptual metaphor theory, particularly in terms of Z. Kövecses, is arguably best equipped for quantitative and qualitative comparisons of discourse data through time. My talk will focus on the conceptualization of Europe, European Union and European integration as well as the employment of metaphors as manifested in the Ukrainian parliamentary discourse of the XXI century both before and after 24 February 2022.
Dr Kryvenko is a chief consultant at the Institute for Strategic Studies (Ukraine). She did her postdoc research in metaphor at the Department of English, Stockholm University (Sweden). Her general research interests lie in corpus linguistic approaches to discourse analysis with a focus on the discursive construction of meanings that are pivotal to political and social change.