A Cognitive Analysis of Argument and Conflict Idioms in English News Headlines

پوختە

This paper presents a cognitive analysis of Argument and Conflict-related idioms in English from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory. Traditionally, idioms were viewed as arbitrary chunks, while cognitive linguistics provides a new perspective for idiom comprehension and claims that idioms are not arbitrary. Instead, they are motivated by conceptual metaphors, and their meanings can be derived from the associations between the source and the target domains.

The study aims at applying conceptual metaphors to argument and conflict idioms found in news headlines. The data is collected from three news websites, namely, The Guardian, BBC News, and The Daily Telegraph. Firstly, the argument and conflict idioms are identified in the thematic index of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (2004), and these idioms are searched in the news headlines of these three sites, so 48 news headlines containing the argument and conflict idioms are found by using the search engine tool of the websites.The analysis of the study reveals 11 conceptual metaphors that exist in argument and conflict idioms, which can be used for understanding this type of idiom, and recognizes that most of the constituent words of the idioms help to activate their actual meaning based on our conceptual knowledge, as  fighting or war tools like dagger, hatchet, sword, etc.