Scepticism voiced through extended metaphors

When metaphors appear in a text in clusters within the same source domain, they are usually referred to as an extended metaphor (Gibbs, 2015; Naciscione, 2016; Semino, 2008; Shutova, 2015; Thibodeau, 2016; Werth, 1994). This creates a coherent narrative or a scenario (Musolff, 2016) encoding the evaluation of a particular socially-contested issue. The present study analyses how the evaluation of higher education reform in Lithuanian media is manifested through extended metaphor and whether negative evaluations prevail. For this investigation, a corpus of Lithuanian media texts on higher education reform was examined within the frameworks of Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2014) and scenarios (Musolff, 2016). The findings show that, when extended metaphors are ascribed positive, negative or mixed values and categorised into mini-narratives, leitmotif narratives and long narratives, they usually (24 out of 28) follow negatively and often death-related and ironically encoded narratives with differently twisted scenarios. This study, therefore, shows a persistent attempt by the media to evaluate the ongoing reform negatively.