Scepticism voiced through extended metaphors

Abstract When metaphors appear in a text in clusters within the same source domain, they are usually referred to as an extended metaphor ( Gibbs, 2015 ; Naciscione, 2016 ; Semino, 2008 ; Shutova, 2015 ; Thibodeau, 2016 ; Werth, 1994 ). This creates a coherent narrative or a scenario ( Musolff, 2016 ) encoding the evaluation of a particular socially-contested issue. The present study analyses how the evaluation of higher education reform in Lithuanian media is manifested through extended metaphor and whether negative evaluations prevail. For this investigation, a corpus of Lithuanian media texts on higher education reform was examined within the frameworks of Critical Metaphor Analysis ( Charteris-Black, 2014 ) and scenarios ( Musolff, 2016 ). The findings show that, when extended metaphors are ascribed positive, negative or mixed values and categorised into mini-narratives, leitmotif narratives and long narratives, they usually (24 out of 28) follow negatively and often death-related and ironically encoded narratives with differently twisted scenarios. This study, therefore, shows a persistent attempt by the media to evaluate the ongoing reform negatively.