A corpus-based study of game based conceptual metaphors in the Egyptian and Tunisian Spring Political Discourse: A Contrastive Study

This paper conducts a corpus-based cognitive-linguistic analysis of GAME-based conceptual metaphors in the political discourse addressing the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions, being the most prominent of all Arab Spring revolutions. In so doing, it seeks to reflect the role of conceptual metaphors in touching upon the ideologies which governed the progress of such revolutions. The general data set comprised 150.000 words collected from the electronic archives of two Egyptian (Al-Ahram and Ash-Shrouk) and Two Tunisian (Al-Chourouk At-Tunisiah and As-Sabbahnews) newspapers covering three years from January 25, 2011, to January 25, 2014. The corpus analyzed in the current study is limited to sixty-eight linguistic expressions. The procedures of MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) in line with the tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, 2003) as well as Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998, 2002) are used to identify conceptual metaphors based on the source domain GAME. Concordance lines for lexical items with metaphorical potential as well as dictionaries helped to provide clear-cut distinction between metaphorical and non- metaphorical usages. Findings showed similar conceptual metaphors in the Egyptian and Tunisian press, emanating from the source domain of GAME. Such similarity is ascribed to mutual culture and mutual linguistic repertoire. Political ideologies in both countries were identified.