Metaphors in press reports of elections: Obama walked on water, but Musharraf was beaten by a knockout  

Oleh:

Burnes, Susan

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 43 no. 08 (2011), page 2160–2175.
Topik: Metaphor Entailment Frame Conflict Elections Conceptualisation
Fulltext: Burnes_S.pdf (413.15KB)

Isi artikel

This article presents a comparison of metaphor usage in British and French newspaper reports of the February 2008 parliamentary elections in Pakistan and of Barack Obama’s election in November 2008. The focus is the role of metaphor in conveying the writer’s evaluation – conscious or unconscious – of an event, principally by means of pragmatic effects like entailments. It was found that the Pakistan elections were predominantly portrayed as conflict, featuring negative evaluations of Mr Musharraf in superficially objective reports. However, the US elections were described using a far wider range of metaphorical source domains, which combined to convey an evaluation of Mr Obama as following a predestined trajectory as part of ‘the American story’, from slavery to an unspecified but better future America. Yet even in these optimistic portrayals, metaphors of conflict still prevailed, providing evidence that botha positive ethos attached toconflict anda conceptualisation of politics primarily in terms of conflict are embedded in Western culture. The paper concludes that some metaphor usage could have consequences for society, such as perpetuating the under-representation of women in politics, and raises questions regarding the appropriateness of some metaphor usage in a climate of global change and challenge

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