The gulf of mexico oil spill a corpus based study of metaphors in british and american media discourse 2

Conceptual Metaphor Theory: Origins and development Conceptual Metaphor Theory henceforth CMT is the dominant paradigm in metaphor studies.. According to this paradigm, Conceptual Metap

CHAPTER 2 THE CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT OF

CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THEORY

2.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory: Origins and development

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT) is the dominant paradigm in metaphor studies The school of cognitive metaphor analysis founded by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) claims that “metaphors play a central role in the construction of social and political reality” According to this paradigm, Conceptual Metaphors are defined as systematic sets of correspondences or “mappings” across conceptual domains whereby a more abstract “target” domain is partly structured by a more concrete and experiential “source” domain Thus, CMT in the Lakoff & Johnson tradition views linguistic metaphors and similes as reflecting mappings across domains

of knowledge that undergird the language user’s understanding of the world in which they live Lakoff & Johnson go as far as to claim a strong version of CMT that sees metaphorical thought in the form of cross-domain mappings as

“primary” whilst metaphorical language is “secondary” According to the Conceptual Metaphor paradigm, examples of general metaphors include path-movement-journey metaphors (“GOOD PROGRESS IS FORWARD MOVEMENT”)

and the strict father vs nurturing parent model (“MORAL AUTHORITY IS PARENTAL AUTHORITY”, “A COMMUNITY IS FAMILY” etc.) The basic idea is that these Conceptual Metaphors have entailments through which they

experiential or embodied dimension Thus, in their view, metaphors may

“create social realities for us and become a guide for future action” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) A good example to illustrate this point would be the

“ARGUMENT IS WAR” metaphor where many aspects of arguments are framed

in terms of war e.g “shooting down arguments”, “launching counter-attacks”, winning strategies that are “right on target” etc However, a key criticism of CMT is that it is founded on a relatively small set of samples that were either artificially constructed or arbitrarily collected Thus, one major proposition to rectify this would be through the adoption of a corpus methodology When used in tandem with a systematic and theoretically-sound framework, this has the potential to put CMT on a sounder empirical and academic footing that enables the extrapolation of conceptual metaphors from authentic linguistic data This thesis aims to extend existing corpus methodology in the identification and analysis of conceptual metaphors in large datasets through the use of semantic annotations in WMatrix software and word sketches in Sketch Engine as an empirical, inductive springboard

But before we move onto the introduction of the new proposed framework, it is important to acknowledge the key shortcomings plaguing Conceptual Metaphor Theory since its inception The original assumption by

Lakoff & Johnson (1980) that metaphor is a cross-domain mapping in the

conceptual system is being challenged by a variety of theorists – with the key points of contention coming from Class Inclusion Theory (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990; Kintsch, 2000; Jones & Estes, 2005) and Relevance Theory

(Wilson & Sperber, 2002, Moreno, 2005) In response, Gentner & Bowdle’s

(2008) Career of Metaphor Theory attempts to integrate the main concerns

raised by arguing that the mental processing behind individual metaphors

“evolve” over the course of their lives from comparison (cross-domain mapping) in the early stages, to categorisation when they become conventionalised (p.123) So this means that the standard source and target domain mapping proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) is increasingly viewed

as over-simplistic as a variety of cognitive mechanisms tend to work in tandem in order to ensure cognitive efficiency for different metaphors, both conventional and novel The main claim is that the Career of Metaphor Theory offers a sophisticated description of the relation between the cognitive and linguistic forms of metaphor

On the other hand, Fauconnier & Turner’s (1997, 2002, 2008)

Conceptual Blending Theory further claims that metaphorical thought is best

represented as a higher level of organisation rather than a simple cross-domain mapping This means that metaphorical thought comprises a network of connected mental spaces that results in emergent structure created by the blended space and the entire network Conceptual Blending (also known as the

“network model”) states that these blended spaces are often structured by more than one conceptual domain or input spaces and these result in a fourth generic space that makes the sharing of abstract structures possible (Kovecses,

2002, p.227-232) This highlights the importance of the socio-cultural context

as a key-determining factor in the cognitive processing of metaphors, apart from the usual linguistic and conceptual considerations These recent developments in metaphor theory will be taken into account in the proposed formulation of the new discourse-analytical framework that attempts to

simply means that the representation of the conceptual metaphors mined from the corpus will include a socio-cultural dimension in addition to the usual linguistic and conceptual considerations in its interpretation and presentation

2.2 Previous Studies: Main Trends

This segment aims to provide a chronological overview of the contemporary development of conceptual metaphor theory from an amalgamation of selected metaphor theorists While this overview is by no

means a comprehensive listing of all the significant works by metaphor

theorists, it forms the broad source of inspiration as well as the theoretical

springboard for subsequent development of the Integrated-approach to the

Identification of Conceptual Metaphors (IICM) proposed in this thesis

2.2.1 An Inductive Approach to the study of Metaphor (Partington,

1998)

Partington’s (1998) key contribution to CMT lies in three main areas Firstly, he advocates a distinction between Systematic Metaphors or Source

Metaphors and Genre-Typical Metaphors Partington notes that Lakoff &

Johnson’s metaphorical concepts e.g “THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS”, “IDEAS ARE PLANTS”, “TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY”, fall under the category of

a “semantic mega-metaphor” His main criticism is that Lakoff & Johnson pay

no attention to the notion of genre or text-type Thus, Partington proposes that data from corpora should be accessed according to a number of different

mega-genres or text-types e.g according to different sections of the newspaper and texts of miscellaneous disciplines in the academic genre in order to provide an element of representativeness and generalisability to the findings and interpretations He feels this distinction ought to be made as metaphor is

“sometimes serious, at others self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek” according

to the communicative context Thus, Partington highlights the significance of consistency in the topic and text-type for metaphorical analysis He proposes that the analysis has to be taken in conjunction with social, historical and contextual factors in the identification and formulation of conceptual metaphors

His second key contribution would be his support for the use of authentic data to support theoretical arguments on Conceptual Metaphors He advocates the amalgamation of a corpus-linguistic approach together with CMT For example, Partington feels that in terms of methodology, it is not sufficient to refer to the relevant sections of a newspaper in isolation Hence, the significance of a metaphor finding must be gauged empirically against a reference corpus This is because it is important to make use of a reference corpus to make a point on the significance of the findings in the targetted text types through a cross-corpora comparison of the nature and frequency of metaphors This approach advocates an empirical foundation for the formulation of conceptual metaphors that is based on authentic language data that is not artificially elicited

Thirdly, Partington supports an inductive approach to data analysis He feels that it is paramount to let the data itself suggest the range and types of

these might be Hence, he sees the first step to metaphorical analysis as necessarily manually parsing the texts through ocular scanning It is clear that Partington advocates a brand of Conceptual Metaphor Analysis that is genre-specific and supports qualitative analysis with quantitative data on metaphor frequency This provides a more robust account of the discourse role of metaphor

Partington’s theoretical stipulations are encapsulated within this thesis

in the choice of genre (online newspapers), the delimitation of the specific topic under study (the BP Oil Spill in 2010 ranging from 20 April – 20 July), the conscious use of the informative writing section of the BNC sampler within WMatrix as a reference corpus as well as the use of USAS semantic categories to mine the relevant metaphors systemically and inductively rather than utilising the traditional method of using intuitively pre-determined search strings

2.2.2 Methodological and Theoretical Issues in Researching Metaphor

(Cameron & Low, 1999)

This book comprises a collection of landmark articles by prominent contemporary metaphor theorists with the main aim of developing an approach towards conceptual metaphor theory that goes beyond mere theoretical semantics and involves a “delicate integration of word-sense, syntactic form, pragmatic context, speaker-listener relationship and goals” (p xiii)

Cameron (1999) focuses on HOW to operationalise the concept of metaphor for research of an applied linguistic nature Hence, she advocates a

view of language where the social and cognitive aspects are integral to formulation of theory and the analysis of data Such an approach foregrounds the salience of temporal and contextual factors in the process of metaphor formulation Cameron also differentiates between two different levels of metaphorical analysis:

1 The Theory Level of Analysis focuses on metaphor identification, the

categorisation of metaphor types as well as the goals and logic of production and interpretation (p.7)

2 The Processing Level of Analysis studies the interaction between the

individuals and their socio-cultural environments in processing metaphorical language in specific discourses as well as how metaphor processing can alter conceptual structures and imbue new meanings to lexical items (p.6)

Hence, Cameron asserts that all conceptual metaphor analysis must take place

in a framework that specifically accommodates different metaphor types and considers the language in a goal-directed discourse context This discourse context should be divided into a local, discourse and global context of systematicity Thus, Cameron emphasises the importance of amalgamating the socio-cultural contexts as well as the relevant discourse goals in the formulation of conceptual metaphors that is culturally relevant and comprehensive

Gibbs (1999) proposes several guidelines in researching and applying

their accounts of metaphor are only limited to particular TYPES of metaphor Here are Gibbs’ proposed categories for metaphor classification (p.30-36):

1 A IS B/ A IS LIKE B : Refers to the typical cross-domain metaphors and

similes in the traditional form of conceptual metaphor

2 XYZ metaphors (p.31): Refers to proverbial expressions e.g the love

of money is the root of all evil; religion is the opiate of the masses; wit

is the salt of conversation

3 Image metaphors (p.32-34): Used in contexts where mental images

from one source of knowledge are mapped onto another (rather than

inter-domain concept mapping) e.g my wife whose hair is brush fire,

whose thoughts are summer lightning, American civilisation is like an orchestra (the symphony of civilisation) etc

4 Single metaphors (p.34-35): These are metaphors that reflect a

particular entailment of the conceptual metaphor - LOVE IS A JOURNEY

e.g we are at crossroads, our marriage is on the rocks, the

relationship is a dead-end street, we can’t turn back now etc

5 Metonymy (p.36-37): Metaphor involves mapping across two different

conceptual domains whilst Metonymy involves only transfer within one conceptual domain

Finally, Gibbs also emphasises the importance of recognising the experiential dimension of metaphors for the twin communicative aims of vividness and compactness Hence, the types of metaphorical manifestations as well as the

contextual and cultural dimensions of the issue under analysis will be fully analysed and examined in this thesis

Low (1999) identifies the vital need for researchers to ensure that the data, theoretical framework and the associated methodologies are representative, suitable and consistent in relation to the topic under study He emphasises that the researchers should not oversimplify and generalise the in-built complexity of conceptual metaphors I will highlight two key issues in validating metaphor research that are applicable to the concerns in this thesis

1 Low identifies the inherent subjectivity in current methods of metaphor identification by individual researchers This subjectivity is due to discrepancies in conceptual metaphor identification criteria as well as the possibility of over-interpretation due to researcher bias and the phenomenon of “metaphor hypersensitivity” (p.53) Low claims that

“post-hoc questioning” often leads to artificially increased information density This is the reason why a standardised conceptual metaphor identification procedure that is theoretically-sound needs to be formulated and continually refined

2 Secondly, it is vital to use a representative corpus within a delineated context for the study of metaphors in order for the findings to be validated accordingly

Hence, it is clear that the predisposition and the interactions within the target group in the discourse influences the interpretation of metaphors by the

broadsheets from America and Britain respectively, where the target readers will perceive themselves either as victims or as wronged perpetrators depending on their respective end of the spectrum This will be coupled with the proposed development of a semi-automated metaphor identification procedure from a large representative corpus in order to ensure increased metaphorical validation by reducing the element of researcher bias

2.2.3 Metaphorical Entailments and Political Legitimation –

(Chilton, 1996; 2004)

Chilton (1996) examines the use of metaphor in the political domain and claims that political leaders are viewed as persuasive when their metaphors succeed in legitimising policies Thus, political leaders use metaphors that will either present their own policies in a positive light or will disparage those of their opponents through the media This makes metaphor an ideological tool for shaping the political or media landscape Chilton notes that

a news article evokes its most “compelling cognitions” through the metaphoric views it takes for granted rather than those it explicitly asserts (p.36)

Chilton adopts a diachronic, top-down deductive approach rather than a bottom-up inductive approach in examining the three concepts of

security, state and sovereignty in Cold War discourse He also examines how these abstract concepts are constructed and mediated through the passage of time and the changing historical landscape Chilton has two overarching aims

in this research endeavour:

1 To explore and understand the conceptual underpinnings of Cold War discourse

2 To trace the historical development of the concepts of security and containment

Chilton describes Cold War discourse as a “self-replicating system of concepts structured in large part by the CONTAINER schema, which is in line with Western concepts of sovereignty and security and foreign policy discourse” (p.416) Thus, it can be seen that Chilton adopts the strong view of CMT that metaphor undergirds human cognition and communication and is a vital cog for human understanding and behaviour Chilton further suggests that power can be thought of in terms of the control of resources, which includes the discursive power to influence and impose concepts on the basis of preferred policies favourable to those in power By using metaphors, those in positions of power foreground the aspects of the phenomenon favourable to them and downplay others, therefore potentially affecting the receiver’s views

The key theoretical contribution in Chilton’s view of Conceptual Metaphor would lie in the two interconnected aspects of metaphor that he

identifies Firstly, he highlights the concept of metaphorical entailment The

main example he utilises is the metaphorical conceptualisation of the state as a person The “STATE IS A PERSON” metaphor means that since states are conceptualized metaphorically as persons – it will be metaphorically entailed that “states have motives, goals, can be sick or healthy, be weak or strong and will have the desire to survive or to dominate” (p.57) The use of such

ones, have to be seen as legitimate/justifiable by the general public Chilton claims that political legitimation cannot be done entirely by the presentation of quantitative, logical and empirical arguments Thus, the cognitive–semantic approach suggests that mental models or entailments play a significant role in the media and political landscape

The second interconnected aspect of metaphor is where metaphorical discourse is seen both as a “constituent and as a product of human interaction” (p.65) In this view, metaphors are used in interactions to minimise conflict between parties by enhancing commonalities and downplaying differences as well as tabooed or threatening subjects This leaves room for the negotiation

of specific meanings and references on a personal and on a political level Thus, Chilton sees Conceptual Metaphors as playing a crucial role at the stage

of articulation since it “acts as a conceptual instrument that enables people to think about situations that are new, complex or remote” (p.71) Chilton (2004) stresses three key strategic functions of linguistic actions in politics and the media:

1 Coercion through the use of resources to influence and dictate agendas with the threat of force

2 The legitimisation and delegitimisation of in-groups and out-groups

3 Representation and Misrepresentation by controlling the nature and channel of the information while foregrounding particular views of reality

Hence, metaphorical embedding in discourse means that metaphors contribute to a situation where they privilege one understanding of reality over others as dictated by those in control This is especially important in an age of electronic media where the circulation of ideas among societies takes place on

an online platform with multiple points of access This provides the discursive space for conceptual contestation and transformation through the various entailments In the same vein, the metaphors used to frame the conflict between traditionally staunch allies; America and Britain, in online newspaper discourse will be examined in order to account for the foregrounding of certain core issues within the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

2.2.4 The Discourse-Evolution of Metaphors (Musolff, 2004a; 2004b)

Musolff examines the socio-cognitive dimension of metaphor by examining the phenomenon of “metaphor evolution” in a corpus of British and German debates about the EU Musolff tracks the historical changes in the use

of the body politic metaphor and discusses the factors involved in conceptual variation through time The analysis examines the historical evolution of mappings from the LIFE-BODY-HEALTH source domain onto the STATE- SOCIETY target domain The corpora used in the study includes EUROMETA 1 – which includes 2100 passages from 28 British and German newspapers from 1989-2001 as well as EUROMETA 2 consisting of 19,000 texts built from two general corpora, the COBUILD corpus from the University of Birmingham and the ‘COMAS’ from the Mannheim Institute for German Language Hence,

this analysis is based in part on broadsheet discourse and provides a good precursor for this present analysis

Musolff feels that the conceptual domain and the accompanying image-schemata often result in a fragmented view of metaphors that is sprawling and disjointed Thus, he proposes an alternative hierarchical system called “scenarios” According to Musolff, “scenarios” provide the “main story-lines or perspectives” captured by a cluster of conceptual metaphors, and can be developed and extended accordingly (p.18) An apt example for this present study would include the intertwining of the WAR and ILLNESS

scenarios – where Louisiana coastline is often personified either as a patient or

as a victim under siege in the process of containing the oil spill in the Gulf (Figure 2.1.)

Figure 2.1

A pictorial representation of Musolff’s hierarchical view of metaphors

Musolff further claims that the “discourse career” of a metaphor depends on two intertwining factors (p.13):

1 The experiential grounding of the metaphor

BP IS A CRIMINAL

2 The “conceptual flexibility” that facilitates its salience in scenarios that deviate from its original conceptualization

This highlights the importance of the socio-cultural and historical context of the discourse in determining how the same metaphorical concepts can evolve and contest against competing concepts in accordance to the specific needs of the discourse participants

Musolff also states that a corpus does not provide any cues for the identification of metaphoricity It only contains concordances of expressions that are then subjected to selection and interpretation by the analyst Hence, the analyst is left with the monumental task of parsing and identifying the concordance lines that have the potential to emerge metaphorical While the existing methods for conceptual metaphor formulation can be seen as both

“tedious” and “subjective” from the positivist school of thought, the USAS semantic tags provided by the WMatrix software enables the researcher to potentially comprehensively pre-identify all expressions worthy of study based predominantly on empirical suggestion rather than from a purely intuitive platform The approach to the mining of semantic domains in Wmatrix in this thesis is based on an extension of Stefanowitsch’s (2006) strategy of searching for “target domain” vocabulary encompassed by the empirically salient semantic domains This novel use of WMatrix that is a departure from existing methods, amalgamated with a well-documented methodology would then potentially result in a procedure that is based on authentic representative texts and that is repeatable

In the same vein, this thesis aims to find evidence for specific metaphors used in the competing American and British discourses for the metaphorical conceptualisation of the BP oil spill This will be done through the use of corpus analysis assisted by the integrated WMatrix platform which exhaustively computes the word frequency profiles, concordances, part-of-speech annotation and the semantic domains The size and the representativeness of the corpus will ensure that the conclusions are drawn only from empirical discourse data This frequency measure is captured by the concept of Log-Likelihood Values where the threshold is set at 6.63 corresponding to 99% significance This measure of overuse is taken with reference to the in-built BNC samplers (Rayson, 2005) This simply means that the Semantic Domains and the accompanying lexical items selected for analysis are statistically significant or empirically salient as long as the Log-Likelihood Value is greater than 6.63 Such an empirical analysis can provide

a unique perspective for comparing conceptual metaphors that underlie public debates in different national cultures This is especially so in America and Britain where the historical, geographical and political cultures are closely related to each other We can thus see the subtle differences in the conceptual metaphors used even though the metaphors can be largely similar in range due

to their cultural proximity

2.2.5 Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004; 2005)

Charteris-Black (2004) is a proponent of Critical Metaphor Analysis (henceforth CMA) The CMA is an interdisciplinary discourse-analytic

approach to the study of conceptual metaphors It proposes an approach that integrates linguistic analysis with contextual understanding and social insight

in explaining the use of metaphors Charteris-Black’s belief is that metaphors have three distinct yet integrated functions - a “semantic role in creating new meanings for words, a cognitive role in developing our understanding via analogy and a pragmatic role that aims to provide evaluations” (p.9) Hence, Critical Metaphor Analysis is a three-pronged approach that integrates these three dimensions Charteris-Black aims to do this by analysing metaphor and its role in specific corpora in order to produce a “discourse model for metaphor” Such a study comprises a thorough analysis of the accompanying pragmatic factors such as the socio-cultural and communicative context as well as its persuasive functions in the associated political contexts Since metaphors are highly influential in the way they covertly shape our beliefs, attitudes and actions across social and political domains, a critical stance is needed for readers to evaluate the intentions of the text producers and identify the nature of particular ideologies

Here is Charteris-Black’s approach to identifying and researching metaphors in the critical tradition (p.244):

1 A search is conducted for “Conceptual/Metaphor Keys” These are frequent and relevant metaphorical expressions found in smaller groups of representative texts

2 These Metaphor Keys are then concordanced in the target corpus

3 The analysis of the findings can then be used to extrapolate the

on the persuasive, emotive and ideological functions of metaphor in different societal and cultural domains

It is important to note that in Charteris-Black’s framework, metaphors are organised hierarchically in descending order of scope in Figure 2.2 as

“conceptual keys”, “conceptual metaphors” and “linguistic metaphors” (p.244) The key claim is that such a hierarchical organisation results in a description of metaphor that is organised and streamlined, rather than a large, disorganized sprawling entity This hierarchical model is merely an abstract inference from linguistic evidence that mainly serves the purpose of establishing frameworks of coherence in particular discourses A concrete example adapted from Charteris-Black can be seen in Fig 2.3 (p.192) Such a hierarchical organisation mirrors Musolff’s two-tier framework of a

“Scenarios” and “Conceptual Metaphors” discussed in an earlier segment (2.2.4) However, the springboard for metaphorical analysis using Charteris-Black’s procedure remains deductive and predominantly reliant on researcher intuition While this does not detract from his excellent findings and well-delineated methodology, it does pose the possibility of the researcher missing out on significant conceptual mappings – especially in the analysis of large, representative corpora This has the potential to undermine the possibility of a thorough metaphorical analysis

1 Identifying candidate metaphors through ocular scanning of a smaller representative sample of texts

2 Qualitative analysis on whether the selected node word is literal or

Conceptual/Metaphor Keys Conceptual Metaphors

Linguistic Metaphors

Fig 2.2

Charteris-Black's (2004, p.244) hierarchical view of metaphors

HUMANS ARE PLANTS SPIRITUAL IS NATURAL

PEOPLE ARE FRUIT

(Jeremiah 12:2)

Conceptual Metaphors

Conceptual Metaphors

Conceptual

Keys

intending to influence opinions and judgements by persuasion as well

as the resulting cognitive criteria of a conceptual shift

3 Use of corpus software to identify frequency and details

4 Formulating the associated Conceptual Metaphors

5 Generalising the findings to suggest understanding or thought patterns which have the potential to construct or constrain people’s beliefs and actions

A systematic and thoroughly documented approach is vital as it ensures repeatability and accountability This is also key for the formulation of a thorough evaluative framework for analysis that can be critiqued and improved on in subsequent studies and iterations However, it is clear that Steps 1, 2 and 4 remain potentially highly subjective as different researchers can observe largely differing levels of metaphoricity in the absence of a procedure that ensures inter-rater reliability Hence, this thesis aims to suggest

an approach that builds on existing frameworks to increase the reliability of the entire metaphor analysis procedure

• Step 1 will be extended through the use of an online concordancing

programme to provide an empirical basis for the pre-selection

procedure - via USAS Semantic Domains and Log Likelihood values

as frequency indicators for overuse This simply means that the springboard for the analysis is data-driven and empirical The broader theoretical discussions underlying this approach (based on key elements of Stefanowitsch’s (2006) detailed overview of corpus-based

approaches to metaphor) will be described in detail in Section 2.2.7 below

• Step 2 can be refined through the adoption of a conceptual metaphor identification procedure that assumes that the lexicon is a reflection of our underlying conceptual system (Kovecses, 2002) and is based on the sentential context of the node word

• Step 3 can be systematised via a lexical approach based on choosing an empirically salient node word, re-classifying its collocations within the designated sentential span and grouping them into coherent general mappings This process is facilitated by the use of “word sketches” in Sketch Engine which are essentially corpus-based summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour (Kilgarriff et al., 2004) In keeping with the empirical tradition advocated in this thesis, only the most salient collocations will be used as a springboard for conceptual metaphor formulation This conceptual metaphor identification procedure takes Hunston’s (2007) and Lindquist’s (2010) concerns into account where the identification of attitudinal meaning in

a set of concordance lines must be taken in tandem with the extended context of the discourse

• Step 5 can be refined and represented through an amalgamation of theoretical frameworks such as Grady, Taub & Morgan’s (1996) concept of metaphorical compounds and metaphorical primitives Grady, Taub & Morgan’s representation of metaphorical compounds and primitives provide a hierarchical snapshot of the metaphorical

diagram is encapsulated by the size of the circles that essentially captures the relative frequencies of the range/type of metaphors formulated from the target discourse This serves to ameliorate the concern that in-depth metaphorical analysis necessarily results in a sprawling complex of metaphors, unrelated to one another

This proposed method shows that while the identification of conceptual metaphors may appear subjective, a clearly delineated analytical method , such

as the preliminary framework proposed in this thesis, provides the reader a formal platform to challenge the resultant metaphor classifications The theoretical relevance and soundness of this methodology can be further refined through subsequent iterations

Hence, Charteris-Black’s Critical approach will be adapted in a unified analysis for the purposes of this thesis However, it is vital that this critical approach should be complemented by the use of large, representative specialised corpora Such corpora provide the extensive collocational evidence required to make informed extrapolations of conceptual metaphor and the accompanying evaluative frameworks as they are based on instances of authentic language use This will enable us to examine the ideological role of metaphor in a contextualised discourse framework of persuasion and also enables us to challenge the formulated metaphors by highlighting what is suppressed Thus, the delineation of the topic, timeframe and the political inclinations of the broadsheet under analysis will be carefully examined and taken into account in this thesis

2.2.6 The Corpus Approach to the Analysis of Innovative Metaphors

(Deignan, 2005)

Deignan (2005) aims to find out how far a theory of metaphor and thought can account for the patterns found in natural language While it is claimed that conceptual metaphors form the background to our conceptual systems and are thus, of great importance – the extent and the scope of such metaphorical framing remains to be definitively quantified A contemporary example cited by Deignan would be the reference to a relatively modern term, the Internet e.g CONNECTED COMPUTERS ARE NODES IN A WEB (p.16) This is

a metaphorical allusion comparing online connections to a spiders’ web where there are thin but strong connections between nodes and involve the coverage

of a large area using fine connections

However, Deignan sees that some metaphors are more culturally mediated than others due to the differences in experiential embodiment These differences boil down to contrasting environmental, socio-cultural and historical backgrounds in each discursive context Hence, Deignan identifies two opposing tendencies in the formulation of metaphors - that the tendency to map creatively from source to target domains is restrained by an opposing tendency to “fix and reuse conventionalised strings” (p.213) Thus, the choice

of source domains can differ significantly in accordance to the speakers’ socio-cultural, historical and current preoccupations This will be examined in this thesis as the conceptual metaphors used to frame the conflict between two traditionally strong allies in the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill in 2010 are studied

filtered culturally and contribute inadvertently to a “collective bias in understanding the world” The distribution of conceptual metaphors across the selected subset of American and British broadsheets will showcase the exploitation of the relevant metaphorical concepts for further analysis

One of the key contributions made by Deignan is her succinct classification of the cline between historical and innovative metaphors This differentiation effectively showcases the importance of being aware of the range of metaphorical expressions that are present in “found data” or language-data in-use The key criterion is that an expression or a term is metaphorical if there is the existence of semantic tension arising from the original literal sense of an entity and the systematic linguistic mapping across another domain A pictorial representation is effectively captured in Figure 2.4

Figure 2.4

The cline between Metaphor and Metonymy (Deignan, 2005, p.39)

Inferences in corpus studies are inevitably drawn from raw empirical