The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill - A Corpus-Based Study of Metaphors In British and American Media Discourse

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the metaphorical framing of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill that transpired from April 20 to July 28, 2010 in both American and British Online Newspaper Discourse. This thesis aims to examine the range of metaphors used in framing a conflict between traditionally staunch allies. This thesis also aims to further describe the exploitation of two integrated corpus-based tools for the identification of metaphorical patterns in large datasets through the Integrated-approach to the Identification of Conceptual Metaphors (IICM), a structured methodological framework. The two software platforms are WMatrix (Rayson, 2005) and Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al, 2004) respectively. The term ?integrated approach? embodies the combination and adaptation of various frameworks into an effective, unified system for metaphorical analysis. The strength of such an approach lies in two significant and inter-connected areas. Firstly, the inductive nature of this proposed conceptual metaphor formulating process marks a departure from existing discourse-metaphor studies that is often accused of subjectivity and researcher bias by critics from the structuralist tradition. Secondly, this proposed method has the potential for an exhaustive analysis of metaphors in a large corpus. This is a departure from the concordancing of pre-selected search strings as the main basis for metaphor analysis and has the potential to triangulate the findings of traditional intensive manual analysis of representative data samples.