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Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 13:2 (2023) ► pp.197–220

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Scepticism voiced through extended metaphors

Assessment of higher education reform in the media

 | Vilnius University
Published online: 30 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.22022.cib
Abstract
When metaphors appear in a text in clusters within the same source domain, they are usually referred to as an extended metaphor (Gibbs, R. (2015). The allegorical character of political metaphors in discourse. Metaphor and the Social World, 5(2), 264–281. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Naciscione, A. (2016). Extended metaphor in the web of discourse. In R. Gibbs (Ed.), Mixing metaphors (pp. 241–266). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Shutova, E. (2015). Design and evaluation of metaphor processing systems. Computational Linguistics. 41(4), 579–623. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Thibodeau, P. (2016). Extended metaphors are the home runs of persuasion: Don’t fumble the phrase. Metaphor and Symbol, 31(2), 53–72. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Werth, P. (1994). Extended metaphor – a text-world account. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 3(2), 79–103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This creates a coherent narrative or a scenario (Musolff, A. (2016). Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) encoding the evaluation of a particular socially-contested issue. The present study analyses how the evaluation of higher education reform in Lithuanian media is manifested through extended metaphor and whether negative evaluations prevail. For this investigation, a corpus of Lithuanian media texts on higher education reform was examined within the frameworks of Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, J. (2014). Analysing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and scenarios (Musolff, A. (2016). Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The findings show that, when extended metaphors are ascribed positive, negative or mixed values and categorised into mini-narratives, leitmotif narratives and long narratives, they usually (24 out of 28) follow negatively and often death-related and ironically encoded narratives with differently twisted scenarios. This study, therefore, shows a persistent attempt by the media to evaluate the ongoing reform negatively.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evaluation and extended metaphor
  • 3.Data and methods
    • Metaphor identification
    • Metaphor interpretation
    • Metaphor explanation
  • 4.Extended metaphors framing the reform of higher education
    • 4.1Death-related metaphorical narratives
    • 4.2Other metaphorical narratives
  • 5.Ideological implications of extended metaphor
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • Cited sources
  • References
References (47)
Cited sources
15min_1 Dideli premjero užmojai: aukštojo mokslo ir esminė mokesčių reformos – jau kitąmet (20–12–2017) [URL]
15 min_2 Aukštasis mokslas, arba Kieno ausys ilgiausios? (05–01–2017) [URL]
15min_3 Artėjant mūšiui Seime dėl aukštojo mokslo Lietuvoje (19–06–2017) [URL]
15min_4 „Fake law“ invazija universitetuose (09–03–2018) [URL]
TV3_1 Ministrė apie universitetų pertvarką: siūlėme vykti greitkeliu, pasirinktas plentas (24–06–2017) [URL]
TV3_2 Stabdo masinio stojimo į universitetus madą: net mokant pinigus, bus sunkiau gauti diplomą (14–05–2017) [URL]
LR_1 Lietuvos aukštojo mokslo laidotuvės – mokslininkai uždirba kaip vairuotojai (11–12–2017) [URL]
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