Recognising and comprehending metaphor in media political report : a cognitive study

الملخص EN

This work discusses the problematic areas in recognising and comprehending metaphor in media political reports.

It is based on what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) called "Conceptual Metaphor".

The researchers have selected some extracts from political reports and tried to investigate the metaphorical expressions in these extracts.

The hypothesis of the study states that there are some points of difficulty in recognising and comprehending metaphor by non-native speakers of English.

In addition, there are some metaphorical expressions which can be recognised and comprehended more easily than others.

This is because not all people are alike in their linguistic competence.

It is one of the findings of the study that linguistic experience plays a crucial role in metaphor recognition and comprehension.

The study covers a number of political reports written on different occasions, and the informants have been requested to recognise and interpret the metaphorical expressions which may be found in these reports.

Meanwhile, a well-educated native speaker has been requested to respond to the same test items and his response has been used as the norm.

By comparing these responses to those of the non-native informants, it has clearly shown that it is possible to diagnose the points of difficulty in metaphor recognition and comprehension, by non-native informants.

The study has mainly concentrated on the role of the academic rank of the informants in metaphor recognition and comprehension.

The variable of academic rank can be used to trace the linguistic experience each informant has.

Therefore, it has been found out that informants with the academic rank of professorship have scored higher than other informants who are of less academic ranks, and so on.