A cross-cultural gender analysis of the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphor in Spanish and English newspapers
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Lorena Pérez-Hernández
Lorena Pérez-Hernández, PhD, works as a permanent associate professor at the University of La Rioja (Spain) from 2001. She has published over thirty papers and book chapters in national and international venues, including high-impact journals like
Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistic s, and several book series by John Benjamins. She has recently co-edited the bookMetaphor and Metonymy Revisited Beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (Benjamins Current Topics, 56; John Benjamins). She is also an active linguistics consultant for the branding and naming company Lexicon Branding Co. (Sausalito, CA, USA).
Abstract
Most gender studies performed from a cognitive perspective focus on the description of metaphors underlying the conceptualization of men and women in different cultures. Little attention has been paid so far to gender-related aspects of the pragmatic uses of conceptual metaphors. This paper analyzes a corpus of opinion columns by two groups of contemporary Spanish and English journalists (male versus female journalists) with a view to identifying the pragmatic functions of the cognitive metaphors found in their discourse. Such metaphors have turned out to act as either mitigating or intensifying devices of the writers’ claims. From a gender perspective, a tendency has been observed for male journalists to use conceptual metaphors in order to intensify axiologically negative opinions or descriptions, while female journalists tend to make use of them for the mitigation of negative descriptions. In both cases, metaphor is also used for the creation of humor, but while male journalists do so by means of downgrading others, female journalists repeatedly play themselves down in an attempt to gain the readers’ sympathy through laughter. These general tendencies have been found to be largely modulated by culture-specific pragmatic factors (i. e. preference for indirectness) and maxims (i. e. Modesty and Approbation).
About the author
Lorena Pérez-Hernández, PhD, works as a permanent associate professor at the University of La Rioja (Spain) from 2001. She has published over thirty papers and book chapters in national and international venues, including high-impact journals like Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and several book series by John Benjamins. She has recently co-edited the book Metaphor and Metonymy Revisited Beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (Benjamins Current Topics, 56; John Benjamins). She is also an active linguistics consultant for the branding and naming company Lexicon Branding Co. (Sausalito, CA, USA).
Corpus
El País. 2005–2014. http://www.elpais.es
XL Semanal. 2005–2014. http://www.xlsemanal.com
The Guardian. 2005–2014. http://www.theguardian.com
The Observer. 2005–2014. http://www.observer.theguardian.com
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Ambiguous storytelling in three texts: unsettling the perception of reality
- A cross-cultural gender analysis of the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphor in Spanish and English newspapers
- When the “other” runs in front of the bull: a membership categorization analysis of a television news story
- Social identity and procedural consequentiality in welfare interviews
- Creepy-ass cracker in post-racial America: Don West’s examination of Rachel Jeantel in the George Zimmerman murder trial
- Extended concurrent speech and guānxì management in Mandarin
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Ambiguous storytelling in three texts: unsettling the perception of reality
- A cross-cultural gender analysis of the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphor in Spanish and English newspapers
- When the “other” runs in front of the bull: a membership categorization analysis of a television news story
- Social identity and procedural consequentiality in welfare interviews
- Creepy-ass cracker in post-racial America: Don West’s examination of Rachel Jeantel in the George Zimmerman murder trial
- Extended concurrent speech and guānxì management in Mandarin
