It has been postulated that a cognitive approach may lend itself well to the study of transferred epithets, as this traditional rhetoric device possesses all the essences of metaphor from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. Transferred epithet metaphors are gradually cognitively cultivated upon human beings’ repetitive and recursive experiences of the real world and it has been well established that they cannot be separated from culture’s limitations or reformulation. The coupling between experientialism and culture in transferred epithet metaphors necessitates the establishment of a double paradigm to comprehensively and profoundly delve into the twofold restraints.

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This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses.