Образна метафора {(върху материал от славянските езици)}

The paper presents а model for the formation of anthropomorphic metaphors as a subtype of substantive metaphors. Componential analysis is used. The conceptual mechanism discussed in the paper is assumed to be universal and acting at the deep semantic level of language. On the surface semantic level of natural languages one can observe the realization of the universal conceptual mechanism of metaphor formation, which accounts for similarities and contrasts of different languages. The formation of metaphors is illustrated with examples from the lexical microsystem of ‘animals’ in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian