Morality models through metaphors: a cross-linguistic analysis

The present study has attempted the analysis of public discourse and its moral expectations through metaphor at a contrastive level in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The study deals with the identification of morality models in public discourse in English and Lithuanian. The materials of the study consist of analytical political articles extracted from the online archives of two following websites: (1) www.economist.com, (2) www.politika.lt. The collected data amounts to 415, 670 words in total. Three methods of analysis were applied to the collected data: qualitative, quantitative and contrastive. The analysis reveals that political affairs in both cultures are framed by the same conceptual metaphors. The structural composition of the conceptual metaphors has been examined in terms of the following thirteen SOURCE domains: MOTION, RELATIONSHIP, STRENGTH, HEALTH, SPORTS, WAR, ESSENCE, BUSINESS, DIRT, SENSES, WHOLENESS, THEATRE, and ANIMALS. The cross-mapping between SOURCE domains and TARGET domains is held by different epistemic correspondences, which leads to the variability of MORALITY models across the two languages, i.e. English and Lithuanian. British politics tends to be more varied in its moral expectations, which derive from three types of Morality Systems: Pragmatic, Rational and Integrated. Thus, the moral expectations governing British political discourse are based on the Complex Morality Model. By contrast, Lithuanian politics is predominantly governed by the Pragmatic Morality Model