Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 16:1 (2026) ► pp.24–46

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Press, police, and protest

The framing effect of elemental metaphors in social unrest

 | National Taiwan University
Published online: 14 July 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.24027.che
Abstract
The metaphorical representation of discourse about social unrest is omnipresent. Elemental metaphors are extensively employed by news articles and media channels to depict social crises and difficult circumstances. This research focuses on social unrest discourse because this field of research has been universally recognized as inherently metaphorical ( (2002). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In particular, it thus studies experimental methods for analyzing metaphorical framing effects and functions of elemental metaphors in social unrest discourse. The results of the experiment show subtle lexico-grammatical differences in metaphorical framing analysis created a significant impact of how the reader construed the same material situation in alternative ways. In both experiments, we studied the role of metaphor in shaping reasoning about the complex societal problem of social unrest. We found that metaphors influence people’s reasoning by instantiating frame-consistent knowledge structures and inviting structurally consistent inferences. Overall, this research highlights how metaphors guide complex reasoning and underscores the value of integrating experimental methods with metaphor analysis in discourse-analytical studies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background and motivations
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)
    • 2.2Metaphor and experimental research
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Material and design
    • 3.2Coding
    • 3.3Participants
    • 3.4Semantic characteristics of the metaphor framing
    • 3.5Experiment 1
      • 3.5.1Procedure I
    • 3.6Experiment 2
      • 3.6.1Procedure II
  • 4.Results and discussions
    • 4.1Experiment 1
      • 4.1.1Discussion
    • 4.2Experiment 2
      • 4.2.1Discussions
  • 5.Conclusion
    • 5.1Concluding remark
    • 5.2Limitations
  • References
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