Impact of Poverty Metaphors in Policy Responses and Government Interventions: A Corpus-Based Study of Poverty Discourse in Northern Nigerian Newspapers

This study examines how poverty metaphors influence representations of government intervention and policy responses. The study uses a corpus-assisted qualitative design and conceptual metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to investigate poverty-related discourse in Daily Trust, Leadership, and Desert Herald articles published between 2020 and 2025. In order to provide a representation of the print media in northern Nigeria, stratified sampling was used to select the three newspapers. On the other hand, poverty-related reports and editorials were purposefully chosen because of their explicit focus on poverty, poverty alleviation, government interventions, social protection, and related policy responses. Antconc version 4.3.1 was used to make concordances and find lexical and metaphorical patterns that were always there. Thirty metaphorical expressions were purposefully chosen from the concordance results, and they were then coded and analysed in accordance with the conceptual metaphor domains and discourse functions that they referred to. The findings shown that poverty was conceptualised as an enemy, trap, burden or problem, line, container are the five most prevalent conceptual metaphor domains that are identified by the analysis. Poverty as an “enemy” is seen as something that attacks, hurts, or kills, encouraging governments to fight it through poverty-reduction programmes. As a “trap,” poverty is viewed as something that captures and prevents escape, leading to policies on education, employment, and social protection. As a “burden/problem,” it is seen as something that weighs down individuals and society, encouraging welfare and financial assistance. As a “line,” poverty is understood as a boundary between the poor and non-poor, supporting measurement and targeted interventions. As a “container,” it is viewed as a condition in which people are confined, encouraging policies aimed at helping people move out of poverty. The study addresses a gap in existing Nigerian poverty discourse research by connecting corpus-assisted metaphor analysis with the representation of government responsibility and policy intervention in northern Nigerian newspaper discourse.