A cross-cultural gender analysis of the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphor in Spanish and English newspapers

Abstract

Abstract Most gender studies performed from a cognitive perspective focus on the description of metaphors underlying the conceptualization of men and women in different cultures. Little attention has been paid so far to gender-related aspects of the pragmatic uses of conceptual metaphors. This paper analyzes a corpus of opinion columns by two groups of contemporary Spanish and English journalists (male versus female journalists) with a view to identifying the pragmatic functions of the cognitive metaphors found in their discourse. Such metaphors have turned out to act as either mitigating or intensifying devices of the writers’ claims. From a gender perspective, a tendency has been observed for male journalists to use conceptual metaphors in order to intensify axiologically negative opinions or descriptions, while female journalists tend to make use of them for the mitigation of negative descriptions. In both cases, metaphor is also used for the creation of humor, but while male journalists do so by means of downgrading others, female journalists repeatedly play themselves down in an attempt to gain the readers’ sympathy through laughter. These general tendencies have been found to be largely modulated by culture-specific pragmatic factors (i. e. preference for indirectness) and maxims (i. e. Modesty and Approbation).