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Expressing negative opinions through metaphor and simile in popular music reviews

  • Marcin Trojszczak ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 2, 2024

Abstract

The present paper aims to investigate the role played by figurative language, in particular metaphor and simile, in expressing negative opinions in reviews of popular music albums. In order to explore this phenomenon at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, it makes use of language data gathered from selected critical reviews of music albums from a reputed English-speaking music website Pitchfork.com. More specifically, the paper analyses selected instances of negatively-laden metaphors and similes so as to demonstrate how they are used to portray key objects of criticism such as music album as a whole, artists and their careers, music genre and its production, songs in the album, and their lyrics. Moreover, it analyses figurative imagery used to express negative opinions about these objects of criticism by pointing out the prominent role of personification and objectification.


Corresponding author: Marcin Trojszczak, University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Konin, Poland, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

The study was prepared as part of the linguistic group of COST Action (CA21129) “What are Opinions? Integrating Theory and Methods for Automatically Analyzing Opinionated Communication” (OPINION).

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Received: 2024-08-30
Accepted: 2024-11-18
Published Online: 2024-12-02
Published in Print: 2024-12-17

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