A tale of two swamps: Transformations of a metaphorical frame in online partisan media

Abstract

Politicians often use metaphors to frame their political agendas, such as President Trump's promise to "drain the swamp." We examine how such metaphorical frames are transformed in partisan media (conservative, liberal). Results demonstrate that the "drain the swamp" metaphor is used in three ways: (1) without transformation, to paraphrase, explain and/or evaluate a statement by a political actor, (2) with transformation of the target, which occurs either through narrowing or recasting and (3) with transformation of the source. These source transformations follow narrative rules constrained by story grammar, and entail the transformation of (a) an event into a state, (b) changing a specific event, (c) adding characters and/or objects, (d) an alternative ending and/or (e) mixed metaphor. We show why and how some strategies are used by both partisan groups, while others are used by one group only, resulting in a different meaning of the same metaphor across partisan media.

Brussels – boss, bully or the big brother?

“…Although cognitive linguistic studies have relied on metaphorical framing as a tool to analyse the way we conceptualise topics related to health (Semino et al 2016;Brdar & Brdar-Szabó herein), finance (López & Lopis 2010;Benczes & Benczes 2018) and society (Burgers et al 2016), metaphorical framing has possibly been the most extensively utilized in the examination of political discourse (cf. Lakoff 2002;Musolff 2016;Burgers et al 2019;Musolff herein). Metaphorical framing is relevant to political communication on multiple levels.…”

Exploiting metaphor in disagreement

“…In the literature, several concepts and terms relate to the reuse of metaphor, such as metaphor extension (e.g., Mio 1996;Steen 2015), co-construction (Mathieson et al 2015), recontextualisation (e.g., Semino, Deignan, andLittlemore 2013), metaphor shifting, vehicle development, redeployment (e.g., Cameron 2010), metaphor transformation (Burgers et al 2019), and reframing (Olza et al 2021). In the following sections, we will explore the commonalities and differences between these terms to determine how metaphor reuse can be systematically categorised.…”

“…Such resistance is of particular interest because it may be powerful and difficult to neutralise, as the initial metaphor users are pragmatically committed to the metaphor that is subsequently exploited to attack them. Although metaphor reuse has received some attention (Burgers et al 2019;Cameron 2010;Landau et al 2017), it has not been systematically viewed in relation to disagreement and resistance. The present study aims to fill this gap by outlining the types of reusing metaphors, that is, by proposing a model that distinguishes metaphor exploitation from constructive metaphor extension and recontextualisation and contrasts these types of metaphor reuse with the strategy of reframing.…”

Bridging the Features and Effects Divide in Satirical News Research

“…"select[ing] some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described" (p. 52). The 'drain the swamp' metaphor, used in Example 1, fulfills all of these criteria (Burgers et al, 2019). First of all, this metaphor implies a problem definition of bad governance, in that Washington, DC, resembles a swamp.…”

“…Second, this metaphor contains a moral evaluation, in that this swamp is undesirable. Last, this metaphor implies a treatment recommendation, in that the swamp needs to be drained, and thereby frames the issue of governance in the U.S. (Burgers et al, 2019).…”