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In:Thinking and Speaking About Time: A cognitive linguistic approach
Edited by Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar
[Human Cognitive Processing 81] 2026
► pp. 308–324

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Chapter 11
All work and no play make the weekend frame go away?

Metonymic micro-variation in online news articles

 | Corvinus University of Budapest
 | Corvinus University of Budapest
 | Corvinus University of Budapest
Published online: 27 January 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.81.11ben
Abstract
Research indicates that the capital for government metonymy appears more frequently in news articles published at weekends as compared to weekdays. This is attributed to the time is space conceptual metaphor: journalists approach the events they report on more holistically towards the end of the workweek. With the globalisation of online news reporting, we hypothesized that the occurrence of the capital for government metonymy in online news would be even throughout the week, exhibiting similarity across different languages. We analysed the metonymical occurrences of Moscow and Washington in English, Hungarian, and Turkish online news. Our results indicate that (a) the distribution of the capital for government metonymy across the days of the week is uneven; and (b) the presence of cultural micro-variation in the form of similar trends in Hungarian and Turkish as compared to British news articles.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Time, where did you go? Figurative language, time, and distance
  • 3.From news cycle to “news cyclone”: News publishing online
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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