The game-based metaphorical representations of the arab spring revolutions in journalistic political discourse

This paper explores how the Arab Spring Revolutions (ASRs) are metaphorically represented in journalistic discourse in a way that highlights or hides specific ideologies related to the political events and actors associated with the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions over three years (2011-2013). Drawing on Charteris-Black's (2004) corpus-based approach of critical metaphor analysis (CMA), the main political events and actors represented metaphorically in the corpus data were identified, explained and interpreted at different levels of semantic, pragmatic and cognitive analysis. The present study reached three major findings. First, various source domains were manipulated to report different facets of the ASRs, while the source domain of games was the most dominant. Second, the corpus proved to be textually coherent based on the conceptual key THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTIONS ARE GAMES which was built around the image schema of competition. Finally, gamification involved three basic scenarios: the first is a general frame of a game; the second clusters games into individual versus team games, and bodily-oriented versus mentally-oriented games; the final scenario represents games as a war. All ideologically-based conceptual metaphors constructed within the frame of gamification are typically Western.