The fighter for peace, Olof Palme' or the metaphoric construction of meaning in the Polish press of the 1980s

Abstract

Cognitive metaphors of JOURNEY, BURDEN and WAR prevalent in the Polish press discourse of the 1980s are identified on the basis of a qualitative analysis of three issues of Trybuna Ludu. They act as a foil for a case study of the imagery of the reports on the assassination of Olof Palme. It shows that the dominant discourse practice od the period is difficult to overcome and can lead to a paradoxical tension between the target and source in metaphorical mapping. The paper is concluded wth a quantificational analysis revealing that the frequency of some expressions assumed to trigger the WAR metaphor is not at all high in war reports, so that their association with the concept must be based on their use in other genres.