Abstract

Context is considered a crucial factor in constructing metaphorical meaning in a dynamic discourse situation. Drawing on Kovecses's idea of "pressure of coherence", the current paper sets out to study the role of context in recruiting metaphorical expressions in newspaper articles and headlines. Data is gathered from newspapers and news websites in Iran, then based on Kovecses' model (2015), the kind of context that triggers metaphor is specified and the data is analyzed using the tenets of Cognitive Semantics. With regard to the research questions, the paper has come to the conclusion that novel metaphorical expressions are recruited under two kinds of pressure; namely, the pressure of context (culture, ideology, climate,geography, discourse topic, discourse elements, spatial and temporal context) and the pressure of body. Furthermore, some factors such as cultural components, body structure and invariance principle may impose constraints on the way mappings are done between domains in metaphorical expressions. Finally, priming as a cognitive process can prompt the use of particular metaphors both universally using shared bodily experiences and/or locally using unique bodily features such as physical paralysis, blindness and left-handedness.