Metaphor as an Object of Evaluative Metalinguistic Reflection in Internet Discourse

The article examines metaphor as an object of metalinguistic reflection in various discursive practices presented in the modern Internet space. The relevance of the study is determined by the urgent need to develop a new direction in linguistic metaphorology to study the features of non-specialized metalinguistic reflection in relation to metaphor. The purpose of the study is to identify and interpret the methods of metalinguistic reflection in relation to metaphor in the space of Russian-language Internet communication beyond the framework of special discourse (primarily philological). The material of the study is a corpus of text fragments (metalinguistic reflections in relation to metaphor), obtained by direct requests for the term metaphor in the Yandex search engine and in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The study was conducted on the basis of an integrated approach, including semantic, contextual and interpretative analysis. As a result of the study, genre and thematic diversity of the implementation of metalinguistic reflection in relation to metaphor in Internet communication was established. The main evaluative characteristics of the terminological unit metaphor in non-specialized discursive practices of Internet communication are identified and characterized. The most typical speech means by which metalinguistic reflections in relation to metaphor are realized (the constructions “metaphor + adj”; derivatives from metaphor; individual phrases with a request for decoding a given metaphor and/or containing the interpreter’s reaction to a certain metaphor) are established and described. The paper proves that metaphor can be simultaneously used as a tool, object and method of metalinguistic reflection.