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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 35:3 (2025) ► pp.348–368

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Metaphors to describe sanctions against Iran in American and Iranian newspapers

ORCiD logo with link | University of Qom
 | University of Qom
Published online: 14 May 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22069.moh
Abstract
Since Iran’s 1979 revolution, Sanctions Against Iran (SAI) has been one of the most crucial issues concerning Iran and the US’ relationships, and both parties employ different metaphors to depict the situation in line with their own ideologies. This study explored the conceptual metaphors (CM) concerning the sanctions against Iran in two corpora of the editorials and news extracted from an international American newspaper (New York Times) and a local Iranian English press (Iran Daily). Following Charteris-Black’s (Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) framework for Critical Metaphor Analysis, sixty editorial news texts (thirty for each), since 2013 until 2021, were scrutinized for the CMs in the two corpora. The findings revealed that although both newspapers took advantage of the metaphors in description of the sanctions against Iran, there were significant differences between them in the employment of the CMs. The American newspaper enjoyed more frequent and diverse metaphors to represent the sanctions compared to the Iranian newspaper, and “SAI is a pain/illness” (22.7%) was the most frequent conceptual metaphor in the New York Times whereas “SAI is a human” (32.4%) and “SAI is a journey” (18.9%) were the common metaphors in Iran Daily. The results suggest how language could be manipulated to serve different purposes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)
    • 2.2Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA)
    • 2.3Studies on conceptual metaphor in political discourse
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Instruments
      • 3.2.1Charteris-Black’s framework for CMA
      • 3.2.2Metaphor identification procedure (Pragglejaz Group method)
      • 3.2.3Dictionaries
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency of the metaphorical expressions
    • 4.2Similarities and differences
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion and implications
  • Note
  • References
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