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.
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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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the Special Issue: Pragmatics, digital content and opinions
- Research Articles
- Discursive news values analysis: the case of Liz Truss’ representation in the British press
- The case of romantic relationships: analysis of the use of metaphorical frames with ‘traditional family’ and related terms in political Telegram posts in three countries and three languages
- Expressing anger on Mexican X/Twitter: the case of Uber customer complaints
- Expressing negative opinions through metaphor and simile in popular music reviews
- Slur reclamation, irony, and resilience
- What is the authentic internet register before & after the Russian invasion in Ukraine? Polish and Czech YouTube comments from 2021–2023
- Application of natural language processing for the recognition of obesity-related topics in the discourses of Argentine Twitter users
- Opinion events and stance types: advances in LLM performance with ChatGPT and Gemini
- Classifying offensive language in Arabic: a novel taxonomy and dataset
- Implicit offensive language taxonomy
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the Special Issue: Pragmatics, digital content and opinions
- Research Articles
- Discursive news values analysis: the case of Liz Truss’ representation in the British press
- The case of romantic relationships: analysis of the use of metaphorical frames with ‘traditional family’ and related terms in political Telegram posts in three countries and three languages
- Expressing anger on Mexican X/Twitter: the case of Uber customer complaints
- Expressing negative opinions through metaphor and simile in popular music reviews
- Slur reclamation, irony, and resilience
- What is the authentic internet register before & after the Russian invasion in Ukraine? Polish and Czech YouTube comments from 2021–2023
- Application of natural language processing for the recognition of obesity-related topics in the discourses of Argentine Twitter users
- Opinion events and stance types: advances in LLM performance with ChatGPT and Gemini
- Classifying offensive language in Arabic: a novel taxonomy and dataset
- Implicit offensive language taxonomy