A Cognitive-Semantic Study of Conceptual Metaphors in English News Reports

This study explores how the development of the conceptual metaphor theory opened new horizons into the way language can be manipulated in the portrayal of the world and our immediate and distant environment of which news, including political news are part.Moreover, political news is the most pervasive type we continually come into contact in our daily communication.Conceptual metaphor is a relation between two conceptual domains, namely, source domain which is concrete, and target domain which is abstract.For example, ARGUMENT IS WAR.We conceptualize and understand "ARGUMENT", the target domain, in terms of "WAR", and the source domain via a process called "mapping".The goal of the study is to carry out a cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphors used in political news reports and how reports of the two newspapers construe political issues reflected in their reports.The study has hypothesized that conceptual metaphors are as common in the news reports of the political register as they are in daily conversational language.However, some types of conceptual metaphors are argued to be more common than others in the register in question whilst all the conceptual metaphors are seen as having experiential bases which are related to our life experiences.