On the way to a multipolar world: metaphors in the BRICS summits declarations

The main focus of the research is the use of the “path” metaphor in the BRICS grouping political discourse. The significance of the research is due to extralinguistic and linguistic factors, among them are the growing role of BRICS on the world stage and the function of the archetypal “path” metaphor in the political discourse structure. The source of the data was sixteen BRICS summit declarations in English (2009–2024). The objective of the study was to investigate the characteristics of the “path” metaphor in the BRICS grouping political discourse. Corpus, definitional, component, contextual, metaphor modeling, cognitive and discourse methods were used to analyze frequency lists, collocations, sets of words covering the conceptual domain, their metaphorical senses and factors, influencing the latter. The findings suggest that the “path” source domain is highly structured, it contains several key components: ways and surroundings; route; purpose, causes and nature; motivating or hindering factors; vehicles; co-travelers, team; journey results analysis. The authors argue that the “path” metaphor sets a direction, serves as a roadmap for outlining short-term and long-term plans, produces images of progressive movement, integrated actions in achieving common goals and overcoming challenges. In the BRICS summit declarations, the “path” metaphor helps to shape BRICS’ collective identity, by strengthening solidarity and cooperation between the countries, modeling positive images of the grouping, shaping the future that inspires and motivates the audience.