Metàfores de conflicte lingüístic: la ‘guerra’ del català i el castellà a Catalunya

Abstract

Mass media do not show reality but present it, or “build” it in a specific way by using rhetorical strategies based on metaphor, comparison or paradox, among other mechanisms. In this paper, a corpus of news dealing with the use of Catalan and Spanish in socioeconomic interactions is analysed. The news instantiate the functioning of the metaphor a lingüístic conflict is a war conflict and highlight the power of metaphor and frames to shape, both discursively and argumentatively, a linguistic situation where two radically different perspectives of the uses of Catalan and Spanish in Catalonia coexist.