Browsing by Author "Franssila, Sanna"

Metaphor in discourse and metaphors as discourse events which join together grammar, context and political objectives were the principal interest in this study. The following research questions guided this study: how genre-specific are buy and sell metaphors, how are they distributed in partisan political news and what kind of metaphorization levels of buy and sell can be found in authentic discourse? Moreover, negative evaluation conveyed with these metaphors in the partisan news coverage of three presidential elections in the United States (2000, 2004, and 2008) was one aspect in this study. The data comprised four text corpora which represent American political news genre: election news (1.6 million words), news or opinion magazines (3.8 million words), cable TV news (4.1 million words) and radio news (4.3 million words). All corpora had a conservative and a liberal subcorpus. On the question of genre-specificity, sell was found to be a genre-specific election news metaphor: there were on average 72% more sell metaphors in the election data than in the other subgenres. Moreover, the occurrence levels of metaphorical and literal "sell + [OBJECT]" -type expressions were nearly even in the election news. All other sell metaphor types were more frequent than their literal counterparts in the election data. Although neither buy nor sell were partisan as such, some types of them were more partisan than others. The "buy into" -type seemed to be characteristic for liberal political discourse. Sometimes there were reverse patterns in partisan use: conservatives preferred the" does not sell" type metaphors and liberals the "tough sell" -type, and to some extent conservatives also preferred the "buy + [OBJECT]" -type and liberals the "buy into" -type. With regard to negative evaluation, negative metaphors were found in the election news data more than non-negative metaphors: there were 36% more negatively evaluative buy and sell metaphors than non-negative in the election news. The increase of negative buy metaphors (78%) in the conservative election news was especially great from 2000 to 2008. Liberals used negative buy and sell metaphors more of their own candidates and party than conservatives of theirs. This paper reveals several future research topics, such as: 1. How are ideological identity and metaphor use, especially negatively evaluative use, linked together? 2. Can the genre-specifity of sell metaphors be confirmed in further studies? 3. Is the "buy it/this/that" phrase characteristic of mediated spoken discourse?