Politicians often use metaphors to frame their political agendas, such as President Trump's promise to "drain the swamp." We examine how such metaphorical frames are transformed in partisan media (conservative, liberal). Results demonstrate that the "drain the swamp" metaphor is used in three ways: (1) without transformation, to paraphrase, explain and/or evaluate a statement by a political actor, (2) with transformation of the target, which occurs either through narrowing or recasting and (3) with transformation of the source. These source transformations follow narrative rules constrained by story grammar, and entail the transformation of (a) an event into a state, (b) changing a specific event, (c) adding characters and/or objects, (d) an alternative ending and/or (e) mixed metaphor. We show why and how some strategies are used by both partisan groups, while others are used by one group only, resulting in a different meaning of the same metaphor across partisan media.

Metaphor production is a creative process of thinking out of the box, which can be of great communicative value to language users. In this study, we explored how metaphor production can be stimulated by different types of cues in an internet environment. Participants (N = 318) were invited to co-create a metaphorical campaign slogan in a social media setting with randomly selected sets of real campaign slogans. We measured how linguistic (metaphor markers) and social media cues (likes) prompt direct metaphor. Results show that the metaphor marker ‘so’ stimulated metaphor production. Likes for previously posted metaphorical slogans did not affect the creation of a metaphor. We found a correlation between the actual and self-perceived creativity of the co-created slogans. Besides, the co-created metaphors both echoed and deviated from previously posted campaign slogans, leading to different degrees of creativity. Co-creation in a social media setting seems a fruitful environment for metaphor production.