Conceptual “Politics Is War” Metaphors in Titles and Sapo of Nhan Dan Online and The New York Times

Abstract

Researching the title and sapo/lead¹ of articles is not a new topic. However, researching these two key elements of news articles from the perspective of linguistics, especially cognitive linguistics, remains relatively strange and receives little attention. The article examines the cognitive metaphor “Politics is War” in the title and lead of the newspapers Nhan Dan Online and The New York Times. Based on correspondences, the article identifies this conceptual metaphor, as well as the mapping mechanism between the “journey” domain and the “politics” domain within Vietnamese people’s linguistic thinking. Based on logical relations in the organisation of the diagram of conceptual metaphor mapping, the article also identifies the distinct thinking behind conceptual structures of Vietnamese culture.