“The suburbs are exploding”: Metaphors as framing devices in the French suburban crisis coverage

Abstract

Ever since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduced their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphors have been seen as important ‘framing devices’: as metaphor involves constructing one conceptual domain in terms of another, the choice of the latter (or source domain) affects how the former (or target domain) is represented.Based on a corpus of French written press reporting, this article will, on the one hand, show that the notion of ‘framing’ is, in line with the findings of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, useful for analysing metaphors as well as for indicating their constructive force. On the other hand, however, this article will defend the idea that an analysis of metaphors in terms of frames does not always suffice and needs to be complemented. Following a recent strand in metaphor studies that shows an increasing awareness of the importance of studying metaphors as linguistic and discursive phenomena (cf. Cameron, 2003; Semino, 2008), we will claim that a more co-text-oriented metaphor approach has to be adopted to account for the nuances and evaluative associations metaphors are able to convey.