Metaphors to describe sanctions against Iran in American and Iranian newspapers

Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur and Mahdi Mansouri
University of Qom

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 (2004) 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.

Publication history

Date received: 20 October 2022

Date accepted: 11 December 2023

Published online: 14 May 2024

Table of contents

Over the years, sanctions have had a serious impact on Iran’s economy and people. Since 1979, especially in the last decade, the United States has used sanctions against Iran to make changes in Iran’s behavior and policies, including Iran’s nuclear program, which Western governments claim is going to be used for nuclear weapons. Iran, on the other hand, counters these accusations and states that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, such as medical purposes and generating energy. Therefore, both parties make use of discursive devices such as metaphors to describe the sanctions based on their own ideology.

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