Abstract
[full article and abstract in English]
 The present article is an attempt to examine the metaphoric models of ironic assessment employed in politicized public discourse in Lithuania. The examination follows the implications of the Blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), and discusses the topicality of the dominant metaphoric patterns in online newspaper headlines and commentaries, as well as in a number of posters the political parties of Lithuania prepared for the electoral campaign. The database of 200 newspaper headlines, comments, and posters allowed to identify dominant references to political issues in terms of sport, miracles, family, business and crime. Furthermore, the analysis has shown that attention should be drawn to aspects of social cognition and culture as they appear to be an integral part of the blending structure and are crucial in successful transmission of both the intended message and the evaluative attitude. Metaphors in the mode of irony follow a double-scope conceptual integration network, as the final blend comprises not only the elements of the two input spaces of the employed metaphor but also the elements of our background knowledge.
Highlights
Dovilė Vengalienė is an Associate Professor at Vilnius University Kaunas faculty
In conclusion, it should be said that a number of Lithuanian ironic headlines and commentaries make use of a metaphoric mode, as the integration structures exploit the mental models of conceptual metaphors
Irony creates communities – the irony is instantly comprehensible only to those who are well familiar with the tradition of ironically addressing Lithuania as the land of miracles, or have the background knowledge of the Lithuanian political discourse
Summary
All metaphors and irony might be analyzed within the framework of blending. Burke in his book A Grammar of Motives (1969) analyses irony, together with metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, and defines them as “the master tropes” (1969: 503–17). D’Angelo’s idea of “intertwining combinations of tropes” is supported by other academic research, e.g. the fusion of tropes has been extensively addressed by Popa (2010) with the emphasis on the priority of meaning comprehension in the case of metaphor and irony. The academic interest of this work was to detect the patterns of irony in Lithuanian politicized discourse that have the underlying mental structure of conceptual metaphors. For this purpose, a variety of headlines, commentaries, and political advertisements. The expression of irony through metaphor could be illustrated with the headline Seimas: zuikis tas pats, tik varnos nebe tos (delfi.lt) (Parliament: the same rabbit, but different crows), where the members of parliament are metaphorically referred to as crows (fighting for the catch5), and where acquiring financial benefit for themselves is metaphorically referred to as a rabbit (seeking for benefit is seen as the pursuit of a rabbit6)
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