Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017

Proper hejab observance has long been an important issue to political-religious conservatives in Iran who, in recent years, have relied on metaphorical language to persuade Iranian women to dress modestly in public. The present paper, based on Kövecses’s (2015) account of metaphor in context, explores the role of contextual factors involved in the formation of hejab linguistic metaphors used in 56 pro-hejab billboards and posters. Data analysis indicates that the moral and social status of women are depicted as being determined by, or correlated with, their degree of veiling. On that basis, properly covered up women are shown to be the recipients of very positive metaphorical conceptualizations (as pearls, flowers, and angels), whereas immodestly dressed women are negatively pictured as being subject to sexual objectification (as unwrapped edibles). Moreover, the hejab is a protective cover is shown to be the metaphor instantiated in many of the billboards and posters. The protective function of hejab is highlighted by conceptualizing corrupt men as flies and devils. Finally, the metaphorical patterns represent the contextual role of political and religious ideology, key cultural concepts, and show entrenched conventional conceptual metaphors and metonymies in the production of novel metaphors.

Direct metaphor has been widely studied from the cognitive perspective, but its functions in the communicative dimension ( Steen, 2011 ) remain less well understood. This study investigates direct metaphor as a tool of metaphorical framing ( Ottati et al., 2014 ; Ritchie & Cameron, 2014 ) in discourse, by examining a corpus of British newspaper texts on the topic of language and language change. The analysis of direct metaphors is sufficient to point to major ideologies of language and communication in the observed media context, which echo broader anxieties over social change, social organization and control. Most notably, unlike the meanings stressed in existing studies, the vast majority of direct metaphors are here found to serve the specific role of relational argumentation. This function is achieved through a kind of ‘corrective framing’, which explicitly juxtaposes two conflicting representations through an ‘A is B and not C’ type of metaphor. The findings are discussed with respect to deliberateness, metaphorical framing and rhetorical goals in discourse. It is hypothesized that corrective framing is among the major functions of direct metaphor in public discourse, which can influence public opinion in ways different from other metaphorically created representations.

This paper examines sports metaphors as symbolic resources for electoral discourse, focusing on both their conventional nature and their strategic value in delivering the political message. It takes the form of a case study analyzing the multimodal realizations of the ‘EuroChampion’ sports metaphor in five posters used by the Romanian Liberal Party in the 2014 campaign for the European Parliament. We argue that the ‘EuroChampion’ metaphor and the richness of sports imagery are strategically used to enhance deeper doctrinal party positioning, such as promoting meritocracy and competitiveness, while, at the same time, empowering women candidates in the election.

Afuganisu-tan is an online manga by Timaking, published in English online in 2005, that presents selected historical events of modern Afghanistan in a series of 29 episodes plus an appendix. An episode consists of a four-panel micro-narrative in which Afghanistan and the countries with which its history is intertwined are consistently personified as young girls. Each manga episode is accompanied by a short, textual ‘memo’ describing historical events in a neutral, factual way. In this paper, we (1) propose that the extended personification of Afghanistan and other countries in this manga can be understood in terms of ‘allegory’; (2) sketch and evaluate how the manga part affects the construal of the country’s history; (3) consider some of the consequences of combining the manga part with memo text for the informative and educational value of Afuganisu-tan.

This study looks into the patterns of metaphor use in the family register of scripted sitcom conversations. Previous studies of metaphor in conversation adopted different approaches to the concept of register, resulting in a rich but complex picture ( Cameron, 2003 , 2007 , 2008 ; Deignan, Littlemore & Semino, 2013 ; Kaal, 2012 ). This research attempts to reduce such complexity by using an approach to register based on closely defining communicative settings and the participants’ roles ( Giménez-Moreno, 2006 ). In this way, we were able to focus on the register used by family members and close friends and the contexts of private oral communication, as opposed to other possible registers characteristic of professional conversations or those between friends. The study provides data on the frequency, typology, grammatical form and function of the metaphors used in the fictional dialogues between family members and close friends from two British sitcoms, “Gavin & Stacey” and “The Royle Family”. The findings, in general, confirm the patterns of metaphor use in naturally-occurring (UK) conversation, but show lower frequency ranges than other more purpose-oriented contexts. The main contribution of this study is the evaluation of metaphor as an ‘appraisal resource’ ( Martin & White, 2005 ) and its frequent use in assessing the participants’ attitudes. The study suggests that defining register in terms of communicative setting and participants’ roles can help to provide comparable data on metaphor variation.

Metaphor frames highlight certain aspects of a target domain and deemphasize others, thereby encouraging specific patterns of inference. A recent series of studies ( Reijnierse, Burgers, Krennmayr, & Steen, 2015 ; Steen, Reijnierse, & Burgers, 2014 ), however, raises questions about the role of metaphor in communication and reasoning by (a) failing to find metaphor framing effects on a series of policy judgments, (b) critiquing the methods that have been used to test for metaphor framing effects, and (c) arguing that current theories of metaphor processing fail to consider the social-pragmatic dimension of metaphor in communication. Here, I reflect on these concerns and present novel analyses of data collected by Steen and colleagues, which reveal metaphor framing effects in these studies but fail to support a prediction of Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT): that extended metaphors are more likely to be remembered. DMT attempts to situate metaphor framing effects more intentionally along a social-pragmatic dimension; developing and testing the theory was a primary motivation of the studies conducted by Steen and colleagues. I discuss the implications of these findings and offer a perspective on how DMT can help grow our knowledge of the function of metaphor in a social world.

Although it is difficult to avoid metaphorical language in discussing and theorizing about communication, language, and metaphor itself, the metaphors we use have entailments that may not be consistent with the analyses they are intended to support. This essay discusses and compares the implications of some of the most common ‘meta-metaphors,’ metaphors used in discussions of metaphor.