The Conceptual Metaphors of Gulf War II in Bahraini Journalism

The chief aim of this study is to investigate the domain of different aspects of Gulf War II metaphors presented in journalism and how frequent the concept of war was manipulated. Metaphor, however, has been considered as simply an ornamental substitute for a literal expression. Since the 1970s there has been a shift in metaphor analysis focusing on its function as a cognitive mechanism to form the unrecognised structure of most human life. Much recent work of the conceptual metaphor theory has been devoted to the highly systematic metaphor exploited by politicians. Within the Middle East, particularly the Persian Gulf, still not fully recovered from the war on Iraq, this study will be of much interest to those who are concerned in how public perception is shifted. The results of the analysis suggest that the metaphors used in the newspapers are structurally coherent and showed little difference from the highly structured rhetoric of politicians. Moreover, WAR IS A JOURNEY is the most frequent metaphor in the corpus of data.