Conceptualization of Europe Union in Turkish Newspaper Opinion Articles in Pro and Anti-Government Newspapers
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Cognitive linguistics defines metaphor as the understanding of one conceptual domain (target domain) in terms of another conceptual domain (source domain) (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1989; Kövecess 2010, p.4). The source-to-target mappings can change according to people's worldviews, background knowledge, and experiences (Kövecess 2010,p. 4). Newspaper genre is generally accepted as one of the most important samples of persuasive text genre. Fowler (1999,p. 1) states that “newspaper language is not impartial but on the contrary, it is a highly constructive mediator”. Thus newspapers with different ideologies present the same event differently with different focuses. Metaphors are heavily used in newspaper to achieve the ideological purposes (Krennmayr 2011, Charteris -Black, 2004). The study aims to analyze how “Europe Union” is conceptualized through conceptual metaphors in Turkish newspaper opinion articles and their role in reflecting the scope and nature of newspapers’ ideologies. The data consisted of fifty opinion articles published from 2016 to 2021 randomly selected from four elite newspapers with different ideologies: pro-government and anti-government. Data analysis drew on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980, 1989) conceptual metaphor theory. Also, the corpus was analysed using the Antconc 3.1. software program that enables concordance and text analysis. Quantitative and qualitative methods were applied using both Corpus Linguistics Analysis (CLA) and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) that is the part of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Thus the frequency of conceptual metaphors used in the data was identified. Results revealed some differences in the usage and distribution of conceptual metaphors between the two sets of data according to the ideological viewpoint.