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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 14:4 (2023) ► pp.638–655

Metaphorical framing in news

How liberals and conservatives talk

| Iowa State University
| University of Montana
This study investigates metaphorical framing in political language. In particular, we describe dominant metaphoric frames which are used by the conservative and liberal media in the US when debating over the different aspects of the socio-political issues. The data for this study have been collected from the online archives of CNN and Fox news that were published on the two topics of medical healthcare system and immigration. We draw upon the ideas from some of the most recent semi-automated metaphor identification approaches to identify metaphors in texts. The findings of this study indicate that the US conservatives use a wider range of metaphorical frames to discuss the political issues. Some metaphorical frames are often used by both parties, while some others mark the divisive partisan rhetoric. Besides, the findings show that there are some metaphoric frames that are exclusively used to talk about a particular aspect of a topic.
Keywords: framing, metaphor, source domain, political discourse, immigration, healthcare system
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Framing in political discourse
  • 3.Corpus of the study
  • 4.Method of the study
    • 4.1Identification of metaphoric source domains in a sample corpus
    • 4.2Identification of key metaphoric source domains in the main corpus
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20085.san
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