부산대학교 도서관

Within cognitive linguistics, metaphor is recognised as a fundamental feature of cognition that structures our experience of the world around us and motivates our actions within it. While research in cognitive linguistics has been focussed primarily on metaphor in ‘ordinary’ domains like time and number, where metaphoric conceptualisations emerge from connections established in embodied experience, it is increasingly recognised that metaphor plays a fundamental structuring role in aspects of social life, where the metaphors that guide social attitudes, decisions and behaviours have their roots in discourse and especially the conventionalised discourse practices of mainstream media institutions. In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the role of metaphor in discourses of political protest. I focus specifically on the role of two salient and highly productive source frames, FIRE and WAR, as well as the less salient REVOLUTION frame, which I argue provides a potential counter perspective to the war frame. I describe these frames and show how they may be indexed in discourse to provide a metaphorical construal of political protests. I discuss the ideological implications of these metaphors within a critical metaphor analysis framework, drawing where appropriate on corpus-linguistic and experimental evidence to support the claim that their instantiations in discourse are likely to achieve framing effects, at least amongst certain audiences. Lastly, since metaphors are not restricted in their articulation to a single semiotic mode, I show how these metaphors may be indexed both verbally and visually in multimodal texts.