Tank “wedges” in Poland and France and a short “blanket” on the Eastern Front: Metaphors of military operations in the memoirs of a German field marshal

This article is devoted to the analysis of metaphors as means of expression and carriers of a special mentality inherent in the professional military. The material for the analysis was the memoirs of the German field marshal of the Second World War, Erich von Manstein. The purpose of the study is to determine the main functions of metaphors in the linguistic picture of the world of the military. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the memoirs of a German military commander were analyzed from the point of view of metaphorization and its connection with the thinking and worldview of a professional military man. The paper offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of the language of war, combining linguistics, psycholinguistics and military history and allowing us to consider the role and functions of metaphorical turns in shaping the perception of military conflicts. The classification of metaphors according to two models is also new: the blitzkrieg and the crisis situation. This approach helps to establish the functions of metaphors, as well as to trace how the perception of two types of combat is realized in metaphorical models. The following results were obtained: due to their imagery and cognitive potential, metaphors fix, explain and classify the key points of military conflict for the author and allow him to express his emotional attitude towards them; that is, metaphors perform the function of categorizing phenomena and showing expression in the linguistic picture of the world of a military commander.