Métaphores de la lutte: variations dans les corpus francophones

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the various discursive manifestations of the war metaphor X IS WAR within media and institutional discourse in three Frenchspeaking areas, using the Sketch Engine textometric analysis platform. Numerous studies, starting with the founding work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have highlighted the weight of conventional metaphor in argumentation techniques and the orientation of public opinion; numerous debates have also highlighted the potential drifts linked to the abusive use of metaphor, particularly war metaphor (Jamet 2006; Semino 2021). However, everyday discourse is still often populated with war metaphors, in a wide variety of fields. Our study focuses on the discursive realizations of the word struggle as a linguistic expression linked to the conceptual metaphor of war: we will analyze privileged collocations of this metaphor in the French language in three corpora based on media communication, as well as in three corpora of institutional discourse, in order to verify constants and divergences in diaphasic and diatopic perspective.