Conceptual Eand IMetaphors in the Language of the Press: a Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

The study aims at investigating conceptual EMIGRATION and IMMIGRATION metaphors and their linguistic manifestations in the British and Lithuanian press articles. The investigation has been carried out in the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory as well the frequency count principle and cross-linguistic comparison have been applied. Of the five types of cross-linguistic conceptual metaphors, the most common source domains include: NATURAL FORCE relating to FLUID and WAR. Language-specific realization of EMIGRATION and IMMIGRATION metaphors manifested some interesting culture specific peculiarities. When conceptualising immigration, English seems to give preference to linguistic metaphors implying inflow of water. Lithuanian linguistic metaphors, on the other hand, have revealed the conception of emigration in terms of water flowing outwards. Moreover, Lithuanian data have demonstrated the tendency to foreground the problem of the scope of emigration through a whole spectrum of source domains (e.g. FASHION, REBUS). Overall, the results have demonstrated a strong tendency towards metaphorical reasoning about both emigration and immigration, which allows concluding that these metaphors are well entrenched in both Lithuanian and British press.