ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 shifts the focus from the representation of social actors (Chapters 3 and 4) and society (Chapter 5) to the representation of the political processes in the British press. The recurring use of words like attack, battle, defend, enemy, and fight in reference to politics suggests that the semantic domain of WAR is systematically transferred onto the domain of POLITICS. The focus of the analysis is the evaluative function of metaphor, which shows how the ideologically charged motif POLITICS IS WAR is employed in the representation of alternative political positions. In terms of methodology, Chapter 6 employs both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The latter includes identifying metaphors employed in the Pre-Referendum Corpus (2013–2014), subsequently extracting relevant words from the corpus, and assessing whether these words are used metaphorically in the target domain. The quantitative analysis is complemented by a close reading of a selection of articles from the respective newspaper corpus.
