Schemata, Archetypes, and Authority: Mapping a Political Figure in the American Press

Paliichuk, Elina (2025) Schemata, Archetypes, and Authority: Mapping a Political Figure in the American Press In: East Meets West: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on America’s Changing Image, 12-13 September 2025, Faculty of Arts UPJŠ in Košice, Slovakia.

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Анотація

This paper explores the linguistic and conceptual portrait of a political persona in the American press. It builds on a case study approach through the media framing of James Michael Johnson, an American lawyer and politician who has served as the fifty-sixth speaker of the United States House of Representatives since 2023. On the day the politician was elected, the American media burst into highlighting the Speaker’s worldview and career path, suggesting the social implications and the role of the iconic American dream on a domestic and global scale. This study aims to build a conceptual and linguistic portrait of Mike Johnson as a political figure. The language data was taken from the corpus of 50 publications at apnews.com, time.com, politico.com, and vanityfair.com, dated 2023. Specifically, quotes and direct speech were used for the analysis to avoid journalistic bias. The methods of Mark Johnson’s image-schema conceptual theory and Jungian archetype theory were applied to identify the pillars of the Speaker’s worldview and forecast its influence on global political communication. The methods of Mark Johnson’s image-schema conceptual theory and Jungian archetype theory were applied to identify the pillars of the Speaker’s worldview and forecast its influence on global political communication. The results reveal the dominance of PATH image schema manifesting in the verbal means in backward–forward direction, thus representing the desire to restore and to resort to the American political legacy rather than the development and progress in the future, and updown direction representing authority and morality; CONTAINMENT (in-out) manifesting the security rhetoric of defending the national borders against migrants; BLOCKAGE manifesting in the tendency to speak more problems and difficulties, or obstacles rather than opportunities, FORCE representing the concept of the strength of America as a world leader. The identified schemata evolve in speech built around faith and religion, family, institution, economy, foreign affairs, and society. The father archetype acts in M. Johnson’s speech as an appeal to authority, power, and discipline when referring to the God (Lord), biological father, the founders of the USA, and the then-presidential candidate, Donald Trump, a follower of whom he is. The findings open new horizons in studying cultural, historical, and political contexts within interdisciplinary linguistic studies and social sciences, deconstructing media images of political personas through linguistic tools. The conclusions imply rethinking the current approaches by making allowance for the schemata, concepts, and archetypes discovered when interpreting the messages in media, which can help establish conceptual prerequisites and develop linguistic measures in response to emerging challenges and political uncertainty framed in American and global media discourse. The results and inferences can be applied beyond linguistic dimensions to construct meaningful transatlantic political dialogues.

Тип елементу :	Доповідь на конференції чи семінарі (Тези)
Ключові слова:	schemata; archetype; politics; portrait; conceptual; cognitive; media; discourse
Типологія:	Наукові конференції > Міжнародні
Підрозділи:	Факультет романо-германської філології > Кафедра лінгвістики та перекладу
Користувач, що депонує:	ст. викл. Еліна Олександрівна Палійчук
Дата внесення:	18 Лист 2025 12:56
Останні зміни:	18 Лист 2025 12:56
URI:	https://elibrary.kubg.edu.ua/id/eprint/53917

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