The need to provide novel but meaningful ways to reason and talk about an unprecedented crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of creative metaphoric expressions in a variety...

Recent discussions on the use of metaphor have centered on how it may be used in a way that has been said to require mandatory attention to the fact that it is metaphorical, resulting in what has come to be known as deliberate metaphor (Steen, 2008 Steen, G. 2008. The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 23(4): 213–241. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). While metaphor deliberateness and conventionality/novelty (...) are conceptually distinct, associations are likely to exist in practice. This article focuses on the deliberate use of conventional metaphor in images, by way of examining the use of animate and anthropomorphic metaphors in an instance of corporate branding discourse (i.e., the prospectuses of Singapore's corporatized universities). Through our analysis, we show that deliberate conventional metaphor serves to reinforce particular conceptualizations rather than effect radical conceptual change. Moreover, we discuss visual and multimodal metaphor as deliberate if used in carefully crafted texts and draw on the notion of an image's connotative meaning to point out how such deliberateness can be further accentuated. The article concludes by discussing some implications for how the degree of conventionality is likely to have an effect on how deliberate metaphor achieves its key objective of changing addressees’ concepts of a particular Target. (shrink)

This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal pronouns and metaphors, and the ways in which positive and negative evaluation is expressed. In functional terms, the (...) hospice managers’ narratives play an important role in representing and constructing their professional views, challenges and identities. Overall, the narratives argue for the role of hospices and professional hospice staff in facilitating a ‘good’ death, and, by presenting a relatively unified view, may potentially preclude alternative perspectives. (shrink)

Starting from the notion of a structural relation between war and rape in patriarchal systems, this article aims at pointing out how this relation is reflected in the co-occurrence of war and marriage metaphors in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis is combined with cognitive metaphor theory to show how metaphors of marriage and romance ("MERGERS ARE MARRIAGES") tend to co-occur with war and various derived metaphors ("M&As ARE BATTLES FOR TERRITORY"). The significance of these co-occurrences is illustrated (...) through corpus data from genres such as newspaper reports and journal articles. Results of additional qualitative analysis are drawn upon to investigate whether the well-established marriage metaphor functions as an ideologically invested euphemism for rape metaphors. Because the latter are more often than not conspicuously absent, the notion of metaphor gaps is introduced and discussed briefly. (shrink)