Conceptual metonymy in media coverage of the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija in Serbian and anglophone media

Abstract

During the summer of 2022 tensions grew in the Balkans after Kosovo refused to recognise Serbian identity cards when entering their territory, reciprocating the same measure Serbia had taken previously. After this, Kosovo's government also declared that Serbian number plates would no longer be officially recognised in Kosovo and Metohija. This led to the EU-facilitated Dialogue between officials of Serbia and Kosovo. Our corpus consists of news published at the end of August 2022 which deal with the dialogue. The article deals with the analysis of conceptual metonymy in the media coverage of the abovementioned events in Serbian and anglophone media in order to determine whether a certain type of metonymy is more present in one of the languages. Given the fact that metonymies are a potent tool because of their subtlety in the text, the aim of the analysis is to isolate metonymies from the text and photographs in the news articles, and highlight possible implications of their use. Finally, the papers looks into how metonymy shapes the processing of the ideological background of these events.

Keywords

• conceptual metonymy
• metonymy of place
• cognitive linguistics
• multimodal analysis
• ideology