EMOTIONAL APPEAL OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS OF CONFLICT IN THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF DAILY NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

The paper explores the ability of conceptual metaphors of CONFLICT to provoke an emotional response in the context of the political discourse of daily newspapers. Furthermore, it is argued that such emotional involvement can facilitate the construction of political reality. The emotional appeal of the most salient CONFLICT metaphors from the corpus that consists of newspaper articles extracted from the on-line editions of The New York Times is tested via appropriate questionnaires. The theoretical framework of the first part of the paper is based on Conceptual Blending Theory, which is expected to provide a detailed account of the conceptual basis that underlies metaphor usage, and the way the emotional appeal of metaphors influences the online process of meaning construction. The questionnaires used to determine the emotional response to metaphors are based on the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion, and they were designed to test the reaction in terms of affect and more specific emotion concepts. Both questionnaires include selected metaphorical expressions from the corpus.