Conceptual metaphors in Jordanian newspaper socio-political discourse during the Arab Spring

Abstract This study aims at identifying and analyzing the metaphors used to describe socio-political concepts in Jordanian Arabic newspapers in the context of the Jordanian protests during the Arab Spring. The analysis also includes the pragmatic functions that these metaphors serve in this context. To this end, a corpus of sociopolitical newspaper opinion articles published in 2011 and 2012 (i.e., the first wave of the Arab Spring) and 2018 and 2019 (i.e., the second wave of the Arab Spring) from two Jordanian daily mainstream newspapers, namely Ar-Rai and Al-Dustour is built from scratch. Metaphors are identified using Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP, Pragglejaz 2007). The results reveal that metaphors convey a number of pragmatic functions, namely, calming down the public protests and outcry and persuading the public to trust the government’s policy of carrying out reform and combating corruption. The study concludes that metaphors are highly affected by a range of socio-political and economic factors.