Piracy Cultures| Pirates, Who are They? A Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of Italian Media Discourse

Annarita Guidi

Abstract


The aim of this article is to propose an outline of piracy as it is represented in the Italian Web press. Departing from the idea that media relationships are conceived as bounded in contractual and commercial “mental” spaces, I analyze the correlation between the semantic structures of pirateria (“piracy”), pirata (“pirate”), and the use of such words in two Web corpora. Results show that the linguistic correlates of “piracy” conceptualization can be explained in terms of image schemas, which recur in metaphorical patterns and syntactic-semantic frames associated with “piracy” and “pirate.”

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