‘‘And Now Hear about the Arrival of the Unwanted Guest to Our Country’’: Analysis of Ideological Functioning of Conceptual Metaphor in the Media

Metaphor, long considered to be serving a mainly aesthetic function in language, has by the turn of the millennium come to be seen as a window onto how human beings view the world they inhabit and function in. This paradigmatic shift has in the main occurred in the humanities and social sciences and is presently taking new directions. Some have even taken the current view of the function of metaphor a step further deeming it not only as reflecting the worldviews of individuals and institutions but also as constructing and possibly determining how those entities should approach a range of issues in their social life. In line with the new role assigned to the concept of metaphor, this investigation has set out to illuminate how metaphor could be discursively constitutive as well as constituted, especially in the media discourses around events. To this end, environmentalist data from the media coverage of the now rife phenomenon of aerosols in Iran, spanning a month of dust storms in ۲۰۲۲, was selected to see what metaphorical scenarios, if any, had been used in/by them and how they might discursively work to gloss over the agency of the individuals and institutions involved in the creation of the phenomenon. Three conceptual metaphors of HAZE IS A GUEST, IRAN IS A HOST, and HZAE IS AN ASSAILANT/ENEMY were found to be of particular relevance to the study. In the discussion, I have tried to illustrate how metaphor could be justificatory of the elite’s actions and intentions.