Microstructure of the multilingual dictionary “BRICS: Discourse Metaphors”

Modern linguistics acquires dictionaries that make it possible to demonstrate the interpretative potential of language in linguistic, cultural and axiological terms. The multilingual dictionary project “BRICS: Discourse Metaphors” meets these requirements. Two main principles - thematic and frequency-based - regulate the content of lexicographic designing: a principle. The thematic principle consists in selecting metaphors with the target domain “BRICS” and its member states. The frequency-based principle presupposes fixing both dominant frames, which aim at representing BRICS and its activities, and universal metaphors within each frame. The sources for compiling the dictionary are media discourses of the member states to identify metaphorical images aimed at BRICS’ self-identification as a civilizational political project. These sources are text corpora, and materials of news agencies and newspapers of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, in five languages: Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Chinese and English. Automated and manual sampling procedures are used to select headwords for the dictionary. The illustrative corpus in each language comprises 1000 texts. Once the texts have been collected, they are further processed using either corpus managers or text analysis software. Then, manual processing and the metaphorical modeling method are applied to fix metaphors, analyze their frame-slot structures, and construct metaphorical systems. Universal metaphors representing the images of BRICS and its member states in the five media discourses, fixed through a comparative analysis, become potential dictionary headwords. These are frequent metaphors naming source domains of metaphorical models, frames and slots. All headwords are nouns arranged in alphabetical order. The dictionary microstructure is developed through definitional analysis, and cultural, cognitive-discursive, and comparative methods. A dictionary entry contains a headword, a definition, etymology, a cultural commentary, examples, a discursive commentary, and cross-references. The microstructure is illustrated by the dictionary entry “СЕМЬЯ / FAMILIA / प रवार / 家庭 / FAMILY”, a frequent metaphor, universal for the BRICS’ media discourse. The dictionary is designed for specialists in political linguistics, journalists, political scientists, translators and interpreters from Russian into Portuguese, Hindi, Chinese, and English. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.