Construing the world: conceptual metaphors and event-construal in news stories

This paper is concerned with conceptual metaphors and event-construal in newspaper language. Event-construal is defined as „the way in which a particular event in the ‚realworld‛ is construed via textualisation“. The paper takes up the notion of metaphors as creative stylistic devices in news stories (analysing stories in The Sun, The Guardian and The New York Times) and shows how tapping into conceptual metaphors helps to establish ‚eventconstruals‛ in texts. This, in turn, it is argued, has many functions, including the most central ones of evaluation and dramatisation. Analysing news stories about different ‚newsworthy‛ events, the paper demonstrates how the choice of a particular event-construal crucially depends on the emotional potential of reported statements. It is proposed that (although there is a lot of interaction between verbal and non-verbal signs which co-establish such construals), conceptual metaphors are particularly important for strategically building up event-construals. These event-construals themselves, it is suggested, are important cognitive devices that help the reader to create coherence.