What Corpus Linguistics Can Tell Us About Metaphor Use In Newspaper Texts

Metaphor is part and parcel of everyday language use, including news texts. To date, metaphors in newspapers have been examined mainly for their rhetorical or ideological power. But are metaphors really ubiquitous in news writing? And what is typical of metaphor use in newspapers compared to other kinds of discourse? A corpus-analytic approach can help answer these questions by revealing patterns of metaphor use in newspaper texts. This paper presents a corpus-linguistic quantitative analysis of metaphors in a set of British newspapers. In order to reveal what is typical of metaphor in newspapers, the dataset is compared to three other categories of discourse, namely academic texts, fiction, and conversation.