The article deals with metaphorical opposition "light-heavy" which the author proposes to use to characterize historical types of societies: from traditional (agrarian and pre-industrial) to modern (industrial and post-industrial). The author realizes the conceptual analysis of the "light-heavy" opposition based on philosophical and literary works of the XIX-XXI centuries (in English, French, Czech, German, Ukrainian and Russian), as well as modern phraseology within different discourses: philosophic, literary, religious, mass culture and popular discourse, and literature, as well as everyday phraseology (Slavic languages). The author performs a comparative conceptual analysis of the "light-heavy" opposition based on modern phraseology within different discourses: religious, discourse of mass culture and popular literature, as well as "folk", "household" (proverbs, idioms), which allowed to explore differences in the interpretation of these concepts in the considered types of discourse, as well as identified literary and phraseological examples of their use to characterize traditional and modern societies.
The study shows the adequacy of the opposition "light-heavy" as a metaphor for traditional and modern ways of perceiving the world, as well as metaphors of traditional and modern societies, which can be described as "light" and "heavy" societies. The conclusions substantiate the effectiveness of using this "light-heavy" opposition to understand the cultural differences of traditional (agrarian and pre-industrial) and modern (industrial and post-industrial) societies. In this case, the metaphorical opposition "light-heavy" is proposed to be understood as a continuum of states from "light" to "heavy", where the traditional agrarian society is on the pole of "heaviness" as extremely "heavy"; postmodern, post-information society on the opposite pole of "lightness" and even "superlightness"; and the modern industrial society is between them as "light", but in many respects still quite "heavy".
Key words: traditional and modern societies, post-traditional society, agrarian society, industrial society, post-industrial society, modern, modernity, postmodernism, lightness-heaviness, light-heavy, conceptual analysis, conceptual metaphor, metaphorical opposition.