الفهرس 
Chapter One: IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 32 |  |  |
| | | from | 32 | | |
Abstract
Based on an eclectic framework including Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory and Context-Limited Simulation Theory, the current study adopts a corpus-based contrastive linguistics approach to analyze various underlying conceptual metaphors shaping the political discourse of the Arab Spring revolutions. The dataset is a corpus comprising 315.000 words divided into two comparable corpora: ArCor (148.000 words) and EnCor (167.000 words) collected from the electronic archives of eight newspapers. The final dataset covers a period of three years from 25 January 2011 to 25 January 2014, and is limited to political issues related to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. First, manual research for lexical units with metaphorical potential is carried out, and then automatic methods, based on concordance lines retrieved from AntConc software, are implemented to compare metaphorical and non-metaphorical usages. Componential analysis and dictionaries helped to feature metaphoricity in the texts investigated. Findings showed that ArCor was metaphorically denser than EnCor in terms of the number of catalogued source domains, frequency of lexical units with metaphorical potential, and metaphorical density. The dominant source domains upon which the dataset is built on are JOURNEY and WAR/GAME since they comprised the most frequent linguistic expressions. Though findings highlighted mutual conceptual metaphors between ArCor and EnCor on the generic level, some statistically significant differences are noted on the superordinate level due to linguistic, cultural and contextbased differences. Furthermore, conceptual metaphors showed considerable differences in the way Tunisian, Egyptian, British and American press dealt with the ideologies governing the political scene in Egypt and Tunisia. Finally, the current study provides an empirical evidence for the feasibility of integrating MIP procedures within the framework of contrastive analysis to compare and contrast two lines of thought.