Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing (2024)

Abstract: Metaphorical language is a pivotal element inthe realm of political framing. Existing workfrom linguistics and the social sciences providescompelling evidence regarding the distinctivenessof conceptual framing for politicalideology perspectives. However, the nature andutilization of metaphors and the effect on audiencesof different political ideologies withinpolitical discourses are hardly explored. Toenable research in this direction, in this workwe create a dataset, originally based on newseditorials and labeled with their persuasive effectson liberals and conservatives and extend itwith annotations pertaining to metaphorical usageof language. To that end, first, we identifyall single metaphors and composite metaphors.Secondly, we provide annotations of the sourceand target domains for each metaphor. As aresult, our corpus consists of 300 news editorialsannotated with spans of texts containingmetaphors and the corresponding domains ofwhich these metaphors draw from. Our analysisshows that liberal readers are affected bymetaphors, whereas conservatives are resistantto them. Both ideologies are affected differentlybased on the metaphor source and targetcategory. For example, liberals are affected bymetaphors in the Darkness & Light (e.g., death)source domains, where as the source domain ofNature affects conservatives more significantly.

## introduction metaphorical language is dominant in various domains of everyday life @xcite . particularly, politicians widely frame their discourses by means of employing metaphors @xcite @xcite . inspired from the aforementioned research regarding metaphorical usages in political domains, * work carried out as a research assistant at leibniz universität hannover, germany the estate-tax foes' real beef is not with the estate tax per se. it's with the principle that the more you earn, the more taxes you should pay and, specifically, with the idea of taxing capital gains. those debates are as old as the tax system itself. the senate must stand firm for an estate tax that provides an ample exemption of up to $2 million per person, but with a top rate, 45 percent, that ensures that a reasonable amount is actually paid to the government. anything less would impair fairness and could be fiscally crippling for decades to come … single metaphor composite metaphor ## data this section presents the construction of our news editiorial corpus annotated for metaphors. we start with describing the source data, before explaining the annotation task and guidelines. then, we describe the annotation process, consisting of two pilot studies and one main annotation phase. ## dataset analysis in this section, we analyze how metaphor types (single or composite) and domains (source and target) correlate to editorials' effect on readers with different ideologies by providing a numerical analysis. the dataset contains 12,006 metaphors across 300 news editorials, 70% of which are single and 30% composite metaphors ( in the following sections, we apply the same methodology to identify significant differences between the following pairs of effects: challenging vs. reinforcing, challenging vs. no effect, or reinforcing vs. no effect. to achieve this, we initially conduct significance tests on a dependent ## conclusion the framing of political discourses often relies heavily on the use of metaphors. in this paper, we introduce a dataset which includes two levels of annotations in the intersection of metaphorical usage and the persuasive effects of political ideologies on readers. the first level is designed to identify metaphors, while the second level aims to determine the domains from which these metaphors originate (source domain) and to which they are applied (target domain). our findings show that liberal readers are affected significantly by metaphors, whereas conservatives are more resistant to them. the impact of metaphors on ideologies varies based on their conceptual domains, influencing how political opinions are either challenged or reinforced in news editorials. for example, liberals are affected by metaphors in the darkness & light (e.g., death) source domains, whereas the source domain of nature affects conservatives more significantly.