Chapter 5
“Today, the long Arab winter has begun to thaw”
A corpus-assisted discourse study of conceptual metaphors in political speeches about the Arab revolutions
The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ represents one of the most significant socio-political crises in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years and its ramifications continue to affect not only local but global policy. This chapter investigates how the Arab revolutions have been conceptualised metaphorically in international political discourse by applying cognitive-linguistic theory (Lakoff and Johnson 2003[1980]; Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and adopting a triangulatory approach combining corpus-linguistic methods with critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004). A wide range of metaphors could be identified with the most pervasive source domains ranging from season, birth-pregnancy-family and journey to contagious diseases and natural forces and disasters. Findings also show that, while using the same mappings, political representatives tend to focus on different entailments reflecting their distinct political backgrounds and attitudes.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Metaphor, political language and persuasion
- 3.Corpus
- 4.Method
- 5.Findings and discussion
- 5.1Season metaphors
- 5.2Birth, pregnancy and family metaphors
- 5.3Natural forces/disasters metaphors
- 5.4Contagious diseases or healthy and unhealthy bodies
- 5.5Journey metaphors
- 6.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
Political speeches and interviews
-
References
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Cited by
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Discourse, Context & Media 44
► pp. 100542 ff.

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