Predstavljanje regionalnih varijeteta srpskog jezika u novinskom diskursu: Kognitivnolingvistički pristup

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the use of metaphor in Serbian newspaper articles that deal with regional varieties of Serbian. We analyze the articles from the cognitive linguistic and discourse analytical angle. To that end, we rely on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, Johnson 1980) and the Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) in our attempt to explicate how the news texts both represent and construct language ideologies, especially those pertaining to dialects. Seventeen newspaper texts, published between 2006 and 2022, were sampled from a daily Serbian newspaper. The constructed sample of 14,207 lexical units was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to determine the metaphor density, the most frequently highlighted aspects of the concept, and the source domains used to talk about those aspects. The results indicate that metaphor use tends to be somewhat lower in comparison to the earlier analyses of Serbian media metalanguage (Bogetić 2015; Bogetić 2018). This is probably due to the fact that the domain of dialects involves a more limited set of target domain aspects, whereas language, as a more general concept, requires a much larger set of source domains.