Ideological representation of Iran & England's newspapers: A Critical Metaphor Analysis

Critical metaphor analysis tries to be a multidisciplinary approach that studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk through metaphors in the social and political contexts.in the present research, through electing such approaches such as critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and corpus analysis, instances of discourse metaphors extracted from opposing wing’s newspapers such as Keyhan and Mardomsalari in Iran and Telegraph and Mirror in England analyzed based on Lakoff’s cognitive approach and Cameron’s discourse metaphor following Charteris-black’s integrative critical metaphor research. The aim was to investigate the similarities and differences between metaphors and conceptual metaphors in each discourse and subsequently in each language. To tackle this concern, considering each wing’s core principals, political parts of the intended newspapers were analyzed and to narrow down the research just five source domains including conflict, structure, journey, religion and plants were focalized. The results showed that the aforementioned languages and the political wings are different in terms of source domains and frequency due to multilingual factors including society, history and culture. The results also demonstrated the metaphorical features of the discourses in terms of source domains. In this study also each kinds of Lakoff’s structural, ontological, directional metaphors and Cameron’s systematic metaphors were identified. Furthermore, this study showed how identical facts are demonstrated differently by opposing ideologies. Finally this eclectic approach came to known as an effective approach in demonstrating hidden power relations.