Drawing on contrastive rhetoric tradition, this paper analyzes the metaphorical expressions utilized in the online news commentaries about the 2016 presidential electoral issues of two Asian countries, the Philippines and Taiwan. Upon a close scrutiny of the data, results show that Filipino journalists tend to thrive on individualistic issues dealing with certain political candidates whereas Taiwanese news writers seem to focus more on collective issues relating to a group such as political party and matters pertaining to their country in general. The data further revealed that Philippine commentaries are longer, contain more word-types and metaphor-laden while Taiwanese articles are shorter, indirect, and loaded with direct quotations. Additionally, findings disclosed four dominant metaphorical themes describing the electoral campaign procedure of the two countries as: ‘straight campaign’, ‘dirty campaign’, ‘witchcraft campaign’ and ‘warlike campaign’. Finally, this study concludes that metaphorical choice reflects the writer’s cognitive and socio-political stance. Pedagogical implications are offered in the light of these findings.
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Diamante et al. (2022) studied this question.
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