INTOLERANT ATTITUDES BUILD WALLS AND BLOCK THE CONSTRUCTION OF BRIDGES: a cognitive-discoursive analysis of systematic metaphor emersion in opinion article genre

Abstract

The article presents partial results of a research which is aimed at verifying how figurative language, specifically metaphoric and metonymic language, present in different textual genres such as the literary and the journalistic genres, contributes to the emergence and negotiation of meaning. The theoretic and methodological basis of the research comes from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, originally proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and expanded in the 90’s by theoreticians such as Grady (1997), and from Metaphor-Led Discourse Analysis (CAMERON ET AL, 2009; CAMERON; MASLEN, 2010). Research implementation involves two stages. An analysis of four exemplars of the genres under investigation according to Metaphor-Led Discourse Analysis and a second analysis, still to be carried out, of the talk of three focus groups composed by students of a state school in Santa Maria, RS, after the reading of the different genres. The preliminary analysis presented of the opinion article selected for this study reveals the presence of image-kinesthetic schemas and metaphoric/metonymic vehicles which structure the language present in the analyzed genre and contribute to the emergence of the systematic metaphor INTOLERANT ATTITUDES BUILD WALLS AND BLOCK THE CONSTRUCTION OF BRIDGES.