Illness-related lexical items and their metaphors in news articles.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate figurative meanings of lexical items related to ‘illnesses’ and analyze their meaning extension from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, particularly conceptual metaphor. To achieve the goal, this study first selects illness-related lexical items and introduces their literal meanings. Then, their figurative meanings are discussed by examining newspaper articles retrieved from an internet portal. Finally, this study attempts to explain how these items extend their meanings in terms of conceptual metaphor. In this way, the study demonstrates that the figurative meanings of illness-related lexical items are based on the metaphor [PROBLEMS ARE ILLNESSES], which conceptualizes real-world issues as illnesses. It provides specific mappings between the target domain of PROBLEMS and the source domain of ILLNESSES for each lexical item, showing the processes through which these items have acquired their current figurative meanings.