How does mass media affect the way we think about controversial topics such as the “Arab Spring”? What persuasive role do metaphors play especially in opinion pieces? We analyze how the political events of the years 2010–2011 in the Middle East and North Africa Region (“Arab Spring”) are categorized and assessed using metaphorical constructions in newspaper opinion pieces. We show ways in which particularly the use of metaphors reveals how the media tried to achieve acceptance for the events based on our cultural models (Quinn and Holland, 1987), which are grounded on our western knowledge. To this end, we constructed a pipeline that automatically detects (and filters) metaphors appearing within certain grammatical constructions, before clustering them by presumed source and target domains (Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The results give us insights into how the “Arab Spring” is metaphorically structured by semantic clusters in opinion pieces.

中文翻译：

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“变革之风”-使用隐喻塑造“阿拉伯之春”的公众舆论

大众媒体如何影响我们对诸如“阿拉伯之春”之类有争议话题的看法？隐喻特别是在观点片中起什么说服力？我们分析了如何利用报纸舆论中的隐喻结构对中东和北非地区（“阿拉伯之春”）2010-2011年的政治事件进行分类和评估。我们展示了通过隐喻的使用方式揭示媒体如何基于我们的西方知识（Quinn and Holland，1987）基于我们的文化模型来试图接受事件的方式。为此，我们构建了一个管道，该管道可以自动检测（并过滤）某些语法结构中出现的隐喻，然后再通过假定的源域和目标域对它们进行聚类（Conceptual Metaphor Theory，Lakoff和Johnson，1980）。