Abstract
Conceptual metaphor functions not merely as an artistic ornament of business discourse but as a cognitive instrument shaping the linguistic worldview of a professional community. A comparative analysis of business prose demonstrates a stable dichotomy: the Russian-language business narrative tends toward somatic and existential imagery, whereas the Anglo-American tradition relies on a technocratic and utilitarian metaphorical apparatus. The aim of the present study is to identify the national specificity of metaphorical modelling by comparing conceptual metaphors in the bestsellers by the Russian author M. Batyrev “45 Tattoos of Personality: The Rules of My Life” and the American author S. Covey “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”. The material comprises 60 metaphorical units extracted by means of continuous sampling. The study employs methods of cognitive metaphor analysis, componential analysis, and the comparative-contrastive method. It is shown that, in Russian business prose, the legitimisation of knowledge and leadership takes place through somatic existentiality: truth must be physically suffered through and integrated into bodily experience. In the Anglo-American tradition, technocratic utilitarianism predominates: the individual and interpersonal relations are conceptualised as an optimisable system in which knowledge is an algorithm and crisis is a remediable malfunction. The findings demonstrate how metaphorical modelling constructs fundamentally different models of success, management, and interpersonal interaction.
Keywords
Conceptual metaphor, business discourse, somatic code, technological code, linguistic worldview, M. Batyrev, S. Covey, cognitive linguistics.