The metaphorical (re)construction of Turkey in political discourse: A corpus-driven critical metaphor analysis

---

Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Yabancı Diller Eğitimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: ESRANUR EFEOĞLU

Danışman: HALE IŞIK GÜLER

Özet:

This study investigates and describes the conceptual (re)construction of Turkey as a sociopolitical structure in domestic and international political discourse. The study identifies the source domains and concepts mapping into the target domain of Turkey, as well as the manifestations of related conceptual metaphors. A corpus-driven Critical Metaphor Analysis is carried out on the corpus of Political Discourse (POLDIS) which consists of articles from Turkish, British and American newspapers in a designated one-month timeframe. The results show that Turkey as a country is conceptually (re) constructed within the frames of (i) Turkey as an ANIMATE BEING, (ii) Turkey as a SOCIAL BEING, (iii) Turkey as an ABSTRACT CONSTRUCTION, (iv) Politics as a JOURNEY, and (v) Politics as POWER. General and sub-metaphors for each conceptualization are presented and discussed for Turkish and English. The results show that source domains of FAMILY, SPORTS, RELIGION, ANIMAL, and SPEED are specific to Turkish while FORCES is specific to English. The majority of the conceptual metaphors is observed in both languages with the exception of THE PACE OF THE TRAVEL IS THE STATUS OF POLITICAL ADVANCES OF A COUNTRY which is only observed in Turkish. The study shows that although the conceptual metaphors used for Turkey are in line between both languages, the frequency and the resonance of the source domains also differ. Turkish provides more variety in the metaphorical expressions and offers unconventional/novel instances of conceptual metaphors such as A COUNTRY IS A POLITICAL CEMETERY. The discursively hinted power struggles in relation to group representation (in-group versus out-group representation) of Turkey are also discussed in a broader political context. The study is preliminary in the sense that it explores the metaphorical conceptualization of Turkey which was not previously researched in the metaphor literature and adds a comparative perspective to the current metaphor studies and suggests directions for future studies.