The Lisbon Treaty and the British Press a Corpus-Based Contrastive Analysis of Evaluation Resources

Evaluation plays an important role in understanding speakers or writers’ attitude towards an event or their feelings about entities and propositions (Hunston and Thompson 2000). Bednarek (2006) argues that evaluation pervades human behaviour and is linked to our beliefs. She also points out the importance of evaluation in actual discourse as it is impossible for any human being not to judge or be completely objective on a particular event. Given the nature of evaluation to be linked to our beliefs, it can be argued that there is a close relationship between evaluation and metaphor as metaphor analysis ‘‘is often, then, an exploration of the inner subjectivity of speakers – what it is that is unique to their perception of the world – and forms the basis for their response to particular situations and particular ideas’’ (Charteris-Black 2004: 11). Against this background, the present paper starts from the findings of a research project on conceptual metaphor analysis in the British press related to the Lisbon Treaty debate and focuses on the evaluative lexis that has often been found to collocate or co-occur with the linguistic expressions of the conceptual conflict and movement metaphors analysed. The evaluative adjectives we are particularly interested in are bullying, desperate, reluctant, arrogant, frightening, surprised, insistent. The evaluative verbs that we intend to explore are admit, blast, praise. However, all the other evaluative terms that might come up to light and have a significant role in the analysis of the event will be taken into account. The aim of this paper is to explore, through the methodology of Corpus Linguistics, how the British press uses the evaluative resources to construe the event of ratification and to what extent it presents a similar description or attributes similar roles to the European leaders and uses both metaphors and evaluation to create a coherent text and image of the ratification issue

The study of metaphor as part of Critical Discourse Analysis

This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA

Constructing issues in the media through metaphoric frame networks

This article draws on metaphor and framing theory to build on our understanding of how metaphor works to frame issues. It suggests that metaphors not only may operate as frames in themselves, but they can also combine in hierarchies of metaphoric frames which together co-construct superordinate metaphoric or non-metaphoric frames. Using insights from theory on mixed metaphor, metaphor hierarchies and scenarios, the article introduces the new concept “metaphoric frame networks” to explain interconnections and relationships between frames and metaphors within the same texts, which could at first appear to be unrelated. The article proposes a set of criteria by which a metaphoric frame network can be defined and distinguished from simpler frames. The argument of the article is then illustrated through an empirical analysis of the process frame in television coverage of the 2015 Catalan regional election