Stylistic characterization of the adjectival metaphor in La Semaine Africaine

Abstract

This article examines the stylistic characterisation of adjectival metaphor in journalistic expression. The aim is to analyse three functional contexts of adjectives that create a particularity of style in journalists' writing: the art of criticizing, representing and characterizing current events and facts. In order to deal with adjectives, we have used a corpus collected in the Semaine Africaine. Thus, the aim is to show that adjectival metaphor has a descriptive and persuasive motivation and that it generates stylistic effects in journalistic language. In the application of pragmatics, our results showed that adjectival metaphor offers journalists an expressive, aesthetic, sincere and photographic style and that it becomes a practice of argumentation in the Congolese written press.