War as source and target: a comprehensive approach to war metaphors |
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Małgorzata Fabiszak (Poznań) |
The cognitive scene today seems to
be dominated by two complementary approaches: Cognitive Metaphor Theory (Lakoff
1987, and Johnson 1987) and Blending Theory (Fauconnier 1997, Fauconier and
Turner 2002). As suggested by Grady et al. (1999) and Coulson (2001) these two
theories may be considered complementary in so far as CMT focuses on
established, integrated in the long-term memory and directional mappings
between usually two input spaces (source and target, tenor and vehicle, etc.),
whereas BT concentrates on on-line meaning construction in the act of
communication; the mappings can occur between a number of spaces (often as many
as four), they may be multidirectional and operate in short term memory.
The aim of the present paper is to
analyse the domain of the concept of ‘war’ as used in English language mass
media discourse. The data source will be drawn from a British daily: Guardian
and n American monthly: National Geographic. The analysis will be conducted
within two different approaches: CMT and BT. The purpose of the study is
two-fold. The first part will try to answer the question what elements are
mapped from source to target, as well as what elements create the generic space
and what is the emergent structure of the blend. It is expected that the
mappings, the input spaces and the blends will differ depending on the fact if
‘war’ is the source or the target. The identification of these differences
should allow us to hypothesise about the more general processes underlying the
elaboration of war metaphors. The second part will consider the use of blending
in the framing of social discourse (Schoen 1993, Gibbs 1999, Coulson 2001). It
is expected to show to what degree authors of newspaper articles rely on
conventional metaphors and when they explore novel uses of established
metaphors as well as novel metaphors in the creation of meaning. This part of
research will also focus on those structures which employ the domain of ‘war’
as one of the input spaces.
References
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