Image-schematic complexes in political discourse conceptualizations

Abstract The paper focuses on image-schematic dynamic complexes as constituent elements of conceptual construction and meaning generation in language. More specifically, it studies the deployment of schematicity in the journalistic register of political discourse, viewed from a comparative-contrastive perspective. A two-component 400,000-word corpus of English and Serbian politico-economic newspaper articles is used for a quantitative analysis that examines schematicity, scalarity and the degree of affectiveness, and bias as a correlative of text topic and newspaper type. The results indicate that although the number of schemas involved need not be significant for an increase in figurativeness in political language, the marked variation in scalarity points to increased or attenuated affectiveness leading to biased reporting. This pertains particularly to the topic of war in tabloid newspapers. Moreover, such an increase/attenuation may be shown to operate in both English and Serbian newspaper articles.