Humanities & Social Sciences 2 (2016 9) 470-480 ~ ~ ~ УДК 811 Internet Conceptual Metaphors Elena N. Galichkina* Astrakhan State University 20а Tatishchev, Astrakhan, 414056, Russia Received 22.04.2015, received in revised form 18.05.2015, accepted 06.01.2016 Although mechanism of metaphoric representations of various conceptual metaphors has been described by the representatives of cognitive semantics, it is still not clear whether people of different nationalities use the same or different metaphors to conceive Internet. <...> The objective of this article is to throw light on what Internet conceptual metaphors are used in English and Russian computer-mediated communication. <...> Moreover, the main focus of the article is to single out central domains used for Internet metaphors. <...> The second part of the article provides the complete description of the mechanism of metaphorical representation of computer-mediated concepts based on American and Russian corpora. <...> A 1500 sentence analysis of the examples collected from the electronic databases American Corpus and Russian Corpus allowed singling out two dominant types of metaphors Internet is conceptualized with. <...> The vision of Introduction the world, the means of cognitive development of the surrounding reality and its adequate perception are deeply anthropocentric: a man can not carry out perception without mental operations by means of already known reality. <...> This mental operation, according to V.N. Telia, “. leaves of comparison, assimilation and fi nding familiar features that produce metaphors, which help “to obtain new knowledge about the world and add them to verbalization” (Telia 1988: 186). <...> In other words metaphors function as a mechanism for cognitive modeling of reality (Ricoeur 1990: 425), the essence of which consists in the fact that during the development of a new phenomenon, a man forms the concept of this phenomenon © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: elenagalich@rambler.ru # 470 # traces in the metaphorical sense, which in turn is “intertwined” into the picture of the world, expressed by language” (Telia 1988: 187). <...> But the most successful results are achieved by the representatives of cognitive semantics. <...> They interpret a metaphor as the transfer of cognitive structure, prototypically associated with a particular linguistic unit from the content area in which it arose to another area. <...> When the process of metaphorisation is taking place <...>