Mersin University Journal of Linguistics and Literature (Mersin Üniversitesi Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi

89-110

Authors: Melike Baş

As a sociopolitical concept, ‘democracy’ has passed through different evolutionary processes and practiced differently in diverse societies since it was first introduced. Therefore, although it seems to be a universal concept, it can be shaped by different cognitive and cultural schemas. By setting out from the metaphoric usages of ‘democracy’ in a corpus, this study aims to investigate the conceptualizations of this concept in Turkish and American English, and to reveal whether this conceptual structure differs in these two languages. Database of the study consists of 4000 samples taken from TNCv3.0, TS Columns, COCA, and NOW. Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) and Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz, 2007) were based on in the identification, explanation and interpretation of metaphors. Findings demonstrate that physical object, conflict, living organism, destination-journey and construction-building are the most frequently employed source domains in both languages. The cross-linguistic comparison manifests that although the source domains that map with democracy show similarities, their quantitative distributions and the typically preferred metaphors might vary in the two languages.