Conceptualizing conflict in Arab economic news reporting

The present article is a corpus-based study that aims to shed some light on the use of conflict metaphors in Arab economic news reporting. When examining the conventionality and functions of various metaphors for conflict, the paper offers the following empirical findings. First, conflict metaphors are highly entrenched in Arab economic journalism. Second and relatedly, the different linguistic conceptualizations of these metaphors can be used interchangeably. Finally, the analyses described herein show that Arabic and English have a great deal in common as far as the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of conflict metaphors are concerned. Thus, these metaphors (1) provide the users of both languages with a very useful frame for understanding and evaluating various social phenomena, (2) are frequently used for highly comparable reasons of persuasion, and — finally — (3) create very similar networks of entailments which, in both languages, structure the readers’ interpretation accordingly. Having discussed the commonalities between Arabic and English, the paper goes on to hypothesize that they might reflect certain fundamental and presumably universal human experiences.