Housing is considered a basic human need. In 2015, Auckland in New Zealand was named as having the fifth least-affordable housing in the world. While other social problems such as immigration, racism and gender inequalities... [ view full abstract ]
Housing is considered a basic human need. In 2015, Auckland in New Zealand was named as having the fifth least-affordable housing in the world. While other social problems such as immigration, racism and gender inequalities have been studied extensively within critical discourse analysis, the basic need for shelter has yet to receive similar attention. This paper aims to address this gap by researching how housing in New Zealand’s largest city was discursively constructed through metaphor in the country’s main newspaper in 2015.
Leading newspaper articles on housing from The New Zealand Herald newspaper were collated and analysed for metaphors, both manually and using a corpus linguistic programme called Wmatrix which semantically tags words. The first stage used a two-pronged approach: initially, manual analysis by close reading of the texts was used to identify metaphor. At the same time, Wmatrix isolated overused semantic fields to identify metaphor (Semino et al, 2014). The main findings from manual analysis were that in the 83 articles on residential housing, there were 215 linguistic metaphors (e.g. ‘mortgage wars’), while Wmatrix was unsuccessful in doing so by merely looking at overused semantic categories, in contrast to past research.
The 215 linguistic metaphors were manually mapped to 67 conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). These were then manually categorised into major metaphor clusters. Manual analysis showed that the top three metaphor clusters of War, Heat and Danger were highly salient, as they accounted for 40% of all linguistic metaphors. Metaphor cluster keywords were then used as search terms in Wmatrix. Corpus analysis results showed that War and Heat metaphor clusters were twice as prevalent as manual analysis had indicated. Methodological challenges of using corpus linguistics when researching metaphor will therefore be discussed, following a presentation of the metaphors identified. Implications of the use of such metaphors in the discourse of housing will also be explored.
References:
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Semino, E., Demmen, J., & Koller, V. (2014). Using Wmatrix for metaphor identification and analysis. Retrieved from http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/melc/workshop_jan2014/MELC_workshop_Jan14_Using_Wmatrix_for_metaphor_analysis.pdf
