This chapter explores basic ethical questions and implications of using metaphor in financial news reporting during crisis scenarios, and the relationship between these uses and common ideals and industry standards for journalism excellence. This research defends that Right to Information (RTI) provides a practical approach for discussing metaphor’s congruence with such ideals towards a more transparent and reliable financial journalism in times of market uncertainty. This work also argues that an RTI informed perspective on metaphor analysis enriches the central assumptions and commitments of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) involving power dynamics and justice in society through discourse: RTI informed uses of metaphor in crisis reporting is an offshoot of the central human right to information.
This chapter analyses the role of conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization and ideological exploitation of the global financial crisis and the subsequent austerity policies in the Portuguese press. The analysis relies on a corpus of news and opinion articles published between September 2008 and March 2009, when the financial breakdown that led to the global economic crisis took place, in June-July 2011, after the entry of the Troika in Portugal and the announcement of the first austerity measures, and May 2013, when protests against the austerity policies intensified. Assuming the general frameworks of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis and corpus-based and discourse-based approaches to conceptual metaphor, the study highlights how metaphor can be a powerful conceptual and discourse strategy to frame economic, political and social issues and to serve emotional and ideological purposes.
Over the past decades, the seriousness with which organisational crises have developed has, in part, been contingent on public access to social media platforms. Analysing two Danish organisational crises, the chapter explores whether the conceptual repertoires that underlie public evaluation of organisational behaviour are embedded in shared social and cultural practices that allow them to be expressed and shared easily and intuitively. The findings suggest that by drawing on well-established experiential domains in social and cultural life, users in public social media may instantiate frames that inspire other users to follow suit. This may create dominant interpretations across platforms and lay the foundation of crisis development.
This chapter explores the role of conceptual metaphor and metonymy in the framing of Kosovo in the Serbian political discourse related to the EU-mediated negotiations on the normalization of Serbia–Kosovo relations. The analysis, set against the theoretical background of cognitive linguistics, shows that the Serbian political discourse under examination features conflicting metaphors for Kosovo and abounds in the toponymic capital for x metonymies in reference to the process participants. The findings concern the conceptual and evaluative nature of metaphors in political discourse, the discursive challenging of metaphor and metonymy appropriateness, the discursive emergence of alternative frames, the role of metaphor and metonymy in maintaining inequality in discourse, and the role of metonymy as an avoidance strategy in discourse.
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.
Heated debates can inspire people to make use of creative linguistic means such as metaphor to express their point of view. In this chapter, I investigate the emotional appeal and persuasive power of metaphors on demonstration posters used by opponents of the railway modernization project Stuttgart 21 in Germany. In this context, metaphors are used both to construct and fuel the crisis. Protesters often draw on quite drastic conceptual mappings to aggravate existing tensions, demonize their ‘enemies,’ and express strong negative emotions like anger or fear. An examination of resistant discourses cannot only shed light on people’s attitudes towards elites, but also enhance our understanding of political protest in general.
Given the centrality of bodily and emotional experience to the notion of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 2003[1980]; Lakoff 1993; Gibbs 2006a and b; Kövecses 2000), this chapter investigates the ‘transformative power’ of metaphor in ‘talking cure’ practices, to face personal crisis and to produce strategic change.
Starting from the centrality of metaphor in the (-re)structuring of experience (Burns 2005; Loue 2008; Roffman 2008), its power as a ‘transformative’ tool is fostered on the basis of its language/thought and embodiment theoretical foundations to implement its application potential. An experimental method emerges, which adapts textual identification procedures (Steen 1999, 2010; Ferrari 2007, 2018; Pragglejaz 2007) to an integrated psychological approach (Rogers 2003[1951]; Perls, Hefferline and Goodman 1951). A psychometric test is presented to evaluate the transformative power of ‘integrated metaphor’ in counselling.
Mental health professionals and their patients often use figurative language like metaphors to depict complex cognitions and emotions that lie at the heart of personal crises during psychotherapy. While qualitative analysis of these metaphors is crucial, understanding usage patterns that develop over time requires complementary quantitative techniques. This chapter illustrates an exploratory log-linear analytic approach to the relationships between speakers, functions, targets, and phase of occurrence of metaphor vehicle terms over 29.5 hours of Chinese psychotherapy talk. The use of factor maps as a data visualization tool is also discussed. Variable associations are interpreted as usage patterns highlighting the nature of metaphor co-construction in psychotherapy. Key discussion points include interactions between time, institutional roles of speakers, and prevailing discussion topics.
This chapter aims to investigate breast cancer survivors’ diverse experiences and complex needs during the critical transitional periods between diagnosis, treatment and survivorship. The chapter proposes and develops an original concept of “narrative modulation” in storytelling, which is employed to analyse breast cancer survivors’ written narratives. The study finds that narrative modulators that function by image schemas, metaphors, frames, as well as psychosocial coping and adjustment strategies are instrumental in configuring and navigating breast cancer survivors’ journeys from health crisis to survivorship. The model of narrative modulation offers an original and useful analytical approach for researchers and healthcare practitioners to gain a nuanced and contextualised understanding of patients’ continual adaptations during cancer survivorship within their own socio-cultural and personal environments.
Despite quantitative research showing differences between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) across genders, little research has qualitatively explored women’s experiences of the disorder. This chapter combines image schemas with illness narrative analysis to explore how women with OCD link the onset of the disorder to traumatic changes in their bodies that are experienced as a crisis. It is argued that the bodily changes disrupt the image schemas that provide stable conceptualisations of the body. The disintegration of the stable body leads to conceptualisations of OCD that, to various degrees, frame OCD as an attempt to regain control over the changed body. Thus, the women make sense of OCD onset by connecting it to personal crises and relationships within specific sociocultural contexts.
This chapter explores basic ethical questions and implications of using metaphor in financial news reporting during crisis scenarios, and the relationship between these uses and common ideals and industry standards for journalism excellence. This research defends that Right to Information (RTI) provides a practical approach for discussing metaphor’s congruence with such ideals towards a more transparent and reliable financial journalism in times of market uncertainty. This work also argues that an RTI informed perspective on metaphor analysis enriches the central assumptions and commitments of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) involving power dynamics and justice in society through discourse: RTI informed uses of metaphor in crisis reporting is an offshoot of the central human right to information.
This chapter analyses the role of conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization and ideological exploitation of the global financial crisis and the subsequent austerity policies in the Portuguese press. The analysis relies on a corpus of news and opinion articles published between September 2008 and March 2009, when the financial breakdown that led to the global economic crisis took place, in June-July 2011, after the entry of the Troika in Portugal and the announcement of the first austerity measures, and May 2013, when protests against the austerity policies intensified. Assuming the general frameworks of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis and corpus-based and discourse-based approaches to conceptual metaphor, the study highlights how metaphor can be a powerful conceptual and discourse strategy to frame economic, political and social issues and to serve emotional and ideological purposes.
Over the past decades, the seriousness with which organisational crises have developed has, in part, been contingent on public access to social media platforms. Analysing two Danish organisational crises, the chapter explores whether the conceptual repertoires that underlie public evaluation of organisational behaviour are embedded in shared social and cultural practices that allow them to be expressed and shared easily and intuitively. The findings suggest that by drawing on well-established experiential domains in social and cultural life, users in public social media may instantiate frames that inspire other users to follow suit. This may create dominant interpretations across platforms and lay the foundation of crisis development.
This chapter explores the role of conceptual metaphor and metonymy in the framing of Kosovo in the Serbian political discourse related to the EU-mediated negotiations on the normalization of Serbia–Kosovo relations. The analysis, set against the theoretical background of cognitive linguistics, shows that the Serbian political discourse under examination features conflicting metaphors for Kosovo and abounds in the toponymic capital for x metonymies in reference to the process participants. The findings concern the conceptual and evaluative nature of metaphors in political discourse, the discursive challenging of metaphor and metonymy appropriateness, the discursive emergence of alternative frames, the role of metaphor and metonymy in maintaining inequality in discourse, and the role of metonymy as an avoidance strategy in discourse.
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.
Heated debates can inspire people to make use of creative linguistic means such as metaphor to express their point of view. In this chapter, I investigate the emotional appeal and persuasive power of metaphors on demonstration posters used by opponents of the railway modernization project Stuttgart 21 in Germany. In this context, metaphors are used both to construct and fuel the crisis. Protesters often draw on quite drastic conceptual mappings to aggravate existing tensions, demonize their ‘enemies,’ and express strong negative emotions like anger or fear. An examination of resistant discourses cannot only shed light on people’s attitudes towards elites, but also enhance our understanding of political protest in general.
Given the centrality of bodily and emotional experience to the notion of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 2003[1980]; Lakoff 1993; Gibbs 2006a and b; Kövecses 2000), this chapter investigates the ‘transformative power’ of metaphor in ‘talking cure’ practices, to face personal crisis and to produce strategic change.
Starting from the centrality of metaphor in the (-re)structuring of experience (Burns 2005; Loue 2008; Roffman 2008), its power as a ‘transformative’ tool is fostered on the basis of its language/thought and embodiment theoretical foundations to implement its application potential. An experimental method emerges, which adapts textual identification procedures (Steen 1999, 2010; Ferrari 2007, 2018; Pragglejaz 2007) to an integrated psychological approach (Rogers 2003[1951]; Perls, Hefferline and Goodman 1951). A psychometric test is presented to evaluate the transformative power of ‘integrated metaphor’ in counselling.
Mental health professionals and their patients often use figurative language like metaphors to depict complex cognitions and emotions that lie at the heart of personal crises during psychotherapy. While qualitative analysis of these metaphors is crucial, understanding usage patterns that develop over time requires complementary quantitative techniques. This chapter illustrates an exploratory log-linear analytic approach to the relationships between speakers, functions, targets, and phase of occurrence of metaphor vehicle terms over 29.5 hours of Chinese psychotherapy talk. The use of factor maps as a data visualization tool is also discussed. Variable associations are interpreted as usage patterns highlighting the nature of metaphor co-construction in psychotherapy. Key discussion points include interactions between time, institutional roles of speakers, and prevailing discussion topics.
This chapter aims to investigate breast cancer survivors’ diverse experiences and complex needs during the critical transitional periods between diagnosis, treatment and survivorship. The chapter proposes and develops an original concept of “narrative modulation” in storytelling, which is employed to analyse breast cancer survivors’ written narratives. The study finds that narrative modulators that function by image schemas, metaphors, frames, as well as psychosocial coping and adjustment strategies are instrumental in configuring and navigating breast cancer survivors’ journeys from health crisis to survivorship. The model of narrative modulation offers an original and useful analytical approach for researchers and healthcare practitioners to gain a nuanced and contextualised understanding of patients’ continual adaptations during cancer survivorship within their own socio-cultural and personal environments.
Despite quantitative research showing differences between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) across genders, little research has qualitatively explored women’s experiences of the disorder. This chapter combines image schemas with illness narrative analysis to explore how women with OCD link the onset of the disorder to traumatic changes in their bodies that are experienced as a crisis. It is argued that the bodily changes disrupt the image schemas that provide stable conceptualisations of the body. The disintegration of the stable body leads to conceptualisations of OCD that, to various degrees, frame OCD as an attempt to regain control over the changed body. Thus, the women make sense of OCD onset by connecting it to personal crises and relationships within specific sociocultural contexts.