Reflets d’actualité/s : la métaphore politique et économique à l’interface du contexte international

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role played by the international context in general, and by such recurring events as the Olympic Games in particular, in the emergence of topical political and economic metaphors. The study of thirty-odd contemporary newspaper articles from the British and American press allows us to highlight the idioms that are coloured by the cultural characteristics of each country thanks to the three-way comparison with French newspaper articles on the same themes, including that of the current global crisis and its effects across the US, Great-Britain, Europe and Jamaica. The guiding line of this analysis, whose framework is provided by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of the American school of cognitive linguistics, aims to point to invariants in emerging textual or visual metaphors better to underline the variations the latter are subject to, while letting themselves be perceived at once as so many counterpoints to any literal discourse.

Keywords

• politics
• topicality
• economics
• the international context
• Olympic Games