Value Metaphors in Films: A Corpus-based Analysis of the Representation of Core Values in American Movies

Metaphors are pervasive in everyday communication, shaping our understanding of abstract concepts and reflecting cultural norms. This paper investigates the role of metaphors in con- veying values in the American Movie Corpus (Forchini 2021–), a collection of manually tran- scribed dialogues of 50 movies produced in the United States. Building upon the definitions of values by Kluckhohn (1951) and Schwartz (1992), the study explores how films mirror and transmit cultural beliefs. The study has two main goals: firstly, to reveal the key values that American movies communicate through language, and secondly, to examine how these values are represented through metaphors.To identify the core values, the study employed the Personal Values Dictionary (Ponizovskiy et al. 2020). A corpus-based approach was then used to uncover and analyse metaphorical patterns underpinning those values (Stefanowitsch 2007). The results suggest implications for domains such as intercultural communication, translation and second- language acquisition where deep understanding of the way reality is perceived in a different culture is crucial.