Metaphors of Everyday Speech in Modern Russian Prose

The article discusses metaphors of everyday speech presented in modern Russian prose. The paper uses literary texts of recent years and the resources of the Russian National Corpus as the material of the study.
It is noted that prose writers actively use colloquial, vernacular and slang metaphors that refl ect various situations of everyday communication. The metaphors of everyday speech are mainly used in fi rst-person narration, as
well as in the dialogs of characters. The article shows that there are different semantic groups of metaphors in modern prose. The most frequent of them are zoonymic, cooking and fl oristic metaphors. Modern literary texts
contain metaphors of different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives). They demonstrate developed semantic and derivational relationships that are signifi cant for the text. On the one hand, modern prose writers use
metaphors that have a long tradition of use; on the other hand, renewal of metaphoric types is observed, in particular, due to the use of computer terms. The considered metaphors perform various functions in modern literary
texts: characterological, emotionally expressive, evaluative, in some cases, intertextual. In modern prose, one can observe prevalence of metaphors expressing negative evaluation of people or objects. Many of them are
stylistically low.