“War” and journalistic language: metaphoricity and objectivity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i19.34723Keywords:
metaphoricity, war metaphors, literal-figurative language, language and subjectivityAbstract
Expressions of war are inevitable in the daily life of media: war in the prototypical meaning (such as the current one, 2022, in Ukraine) and in a metaphorical meaning, such as those in sports (in Portugal they appear mainly when the theme is football) or “everyday fights” for survival.
Apparently, the thematic real war-metaphorical “war” does not convey ambiguity, since the classical tradition of Rhetoric is based on the axiom that, in verbal language, the literal plane is not confused with the figurative plane.
This text starts from a divergent perspective of classical Rhetoric, because it argues that there is no dual or rigid separation between metaphorical and non-metaphorical language, and admits that there are different degrees of metaphoricity, which is understood as a dynamic and variable distance between non-figurative-figurative plane (or connotation-denotation, not metaphorical-metaphorical planes).
We therefore argue that, in the case of discourse on war and conflicts, the same situation can be presented as “war” (real) and as “non-war” (only metaphorical war) and, therefore, the discourse can have manipulative power in the construction of transmitted concepts.
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