The interplay of conceptual metaphors and evaluation in press reports on the AUKUS agreement

The linguistic literature has shown that metaphor provokes evaluative meanings, but it is unclear how different types of metaphor, as well as different genres of discourse influence the realization of such meanings. To partially answer this question, our study aims to investigate the relationship between conceptual metaphors and evaluation in Australian broadsheet and tabloid articles on the AUKUS alliance, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. The data comprise all Australian news and opinion articles gathered from Nexis Uni through the University of Granada’s e-library between September 15, 2021, and October 31, 2021. The study employs a parameter-based approach to evaluation and its methodology involves the annotation of metaphors according to the parameters of creativity/conventionality, as well as the examination of their source and target domains. The quantitative analysis indicates that there is a connection between the types of metaphors (conventional and creative) and the characteristics of their evaluation (polarity and explicitness), which are affected by the genre of the corpus and the topic of the content where the metaphors appear. Additionally, the corpus shows that negative emotivity is a prevalent evaluative component of metaphors in both newspapers. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that conceptualizations of metaphors alternate between biological and mechanistic images of the world, with the dominant metaphor domains being almost unilaterally used in both broadsheets and tabloids. The implications of the study suggest that the complex relationship between metaphor and evaluation should be interpreted in light of the text’s genre and topic rather than separately.