A comparative critical metaphor analysis on the concept of democracy in Turkish and American English

Abstract This corpus-based study concentrates on the metaphorical conceptualizations of the concept of ‘democracy’ in Turkish and American English to find out how this socio-political term is conceptually represented in the minds of Turkish and American speakers. The database consists of 4000 concordance lines that were extracted from four different corpora: TNCv3.0, TS Columns, COCA, and NOW. Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) and MIP (Pragglejaz, 2007) were employed in the identification, explanation and interpretation of metaphors. Findings indicate various linguistic metaphors that can be grouped under several source domain categories including physical object, conflict and living organism as the most frequent ones. The most widespread metaphor in Turkish is democracy is a destination, whereas it is democracy is war in American English, embodying two different worldviews. The study proposes that the way the concept of democracy is composed has a role in manipulating people’s perception of the type of a democracy they are ruled by.