Sell Metaphors in American Political News Discourse

This paper addresses sell metaphors in American news discourse in the 1990s and 2000s.The aim was to study with corpus analytic methods if metaphorical selling is characteristic of political news and if there are discourse topics that enhance the use of sell metaphors. Sell metaphors seem to be more frequent when a discourse topic is political, and they are very often used in the context of a president's actions. Sell metaphors are most frequent in election news.