In the mind’s eye: Mental conceptualization of floods by the British and the Bulgarian media

Abstract

From a cognitive linguistics perspective, the present study is aimed at the analysis of manifestations of metaphorical mental conceptualizations of flooding events in terms of war in the language used by the British and the Bulgarian journalists and the extent to which the implementation of the cognitive metaphor FLOODING CRISIS IS WAR differs in the media representations of the two countries. The corpus used for the research consists of 19 articles extracted from the electronic databases of four newspapers – two for the British discourse (the Guardian and the Independent) and two for the Bulgarian discourse (Monitor and Standart). A total of 33 example sentences have been extracted from the corpus (21 from the British media and 12 from the Bulgarian media) and they have been coded with respect to the mappings between the source and target domain of the cognitive metaphor. The results of the research show that the media both in the UK and Bulgaria rely on metaphorical projection from the domain of war when flooding crises are reported, which confirms the notion that metaphorical projection is a universal structural element of cognition.