Metaphorical Use Of Color In Political And Media Discourse: Evidence From English And Uzbek

Color terms are among the most productive sources of conceptual metaphor, yet comparative studies that examine how they shape political and media discourse across unrelated languages remain scarce. Drawing on a balanced corpus of 10 million words from English‐language U.S. news outlets and 8 million words from Uzbek‐language newspapers, parliamentary debates, and televised interviews (2010-2024), this article investigates the metaphorical deployment of basic color lexemes in framing ideological positions, legitimising power, and constructing in-group/out-group boundaries. Using a mixed methodology that combines cognitive-semantic analysis with corpus-assisted discourse studies, we identify convergent patterns—such as the evaluative polarity of black/oq and white/qora—and language-specific innovations, including the prominence of green metaphors in Uzbek ecological politics and the entrenched red–blue partisan dichotomy in American electoral talk. Statistical keyword and collocation tests reveal that color metaphors cluster around four macro-domains (morality, security, economic stability, and national identity) and perform distinct pragmatic functions: emotional intensification in headlines, moral evaluation in editorials, and strategic vagueness in politician sound bites. The findings contribute to metaphor theory by demonstrating how cultural scripts, media routines, and party branding dynamically recalibrate the cross-linguistic mappings between chromatic perception and socio-political meaning.

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